h.l. mencken on music

1 09 985

BOOKS BY

H. L MENCKEN

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGETHE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement One

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE: Supplement Two

HAPPYDAYStogether> constitute

NEWSPAPER DAYS,T/ie Days of H. L. Mencken

HEATHEN DAYS J

A NEW DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONSTREATISE ON THE GODSCHRISTMAS STORYA MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (with selections

from the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In

Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a

President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and

Wrong, with pieces from the American Mercury, Smart

Set, and Baltimore Evening Sun and some previously

unpublished notes

MINORITY REPORT: H. L. Mencken's Notebooks

THE BATHTUB HOAX and Other Blasts and Bravos

from the Chicago Tribune

LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN, Selected and An-

notated by Guy J. Forgue

H. L. MENCKEN ON MUSIC, Edited by Louis Ches-

lock

These are BORZOI BOOKS published by ALFRED A. KNOPFin New York

H'L-MENCKEN ON MUSIC

PLATE I H. L Mencken, at home on Hollins Street, Baltimore, 1928

H L Mencken"

*> i*

ON MUSIC

A Selection of

HIS WRITINGS ON MUSIC

together with an Account of

H-L-MENCKEN'S MUSICAL LIFE

and a History of

THE SATURDAY NIGHT CLUB

B y

Louis Cheslock

ALFRED-A'KNOPF NEW YORK

L. C. catalog card number: 6113949

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK,

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1916, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926,

1927, 1940, 1949, 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Re-

newal copyrights 1944, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1954,

1955 by H. L. Mencken. All rights reserved. No part of

this book may be reproduced in any form without per-

mission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer

who may quote brief passages and reproduce not morethan three illustrations in a review to be printed in a maga-zine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States

of America. Published simultaneously in Canada

by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd.

FIRST EDITION

HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN

BALTIMORE

September 12, 1880 -January 29, 1956

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To HENRY MENCKEN'S BROTHER, August, I am profoundly

grateful for his abiding interest in this book, and for the

innumerable ways in which he helped in its preparation.

Also for the many things of which I was unaware he gave

freely of his intimate knowledge and experience. To Rich-

ard Hart, head of the Literature Department of the Enoch

Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, my cordial thanks for mak-

ing reference works and the Mencken Room available to

me often for research. I am sincerely appreciative for per-

mission to use copyrighted material from the publications

of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N.Y. (the six series of Prejudices,

Happy Days, A Book of Cdumny, A Book of Burlesques

and A Mencken Chrestomathy, all by H. L. Mencken).

Best thanks to the Sunpapers, Baltimore, for permission to

reprint numerous articles, as listed; also to the Chicago*

x Acknowledgments

Tribune, for two articles, as listed. To Simon and Schuster,

Inc., N.Y., my thanks for permission to quote from Men

and Music, by Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock;

also to the Etude, magazine, Theodore Presser Co., pub-

lisher, to quote as noted. To the Mercantile Safe Deposit

and Trust Co., Baltimore, trustee of the Henry L. Mencken

estate, sincere appreciation for permission to quote from

letters and copyrighted published material. Above all,

especial thanks to Henry Mencken, himself, for having

committed to print his thoughts on music the art in

which we shared together so many happy hours.

Louis CHESLOCK

CONTENTS

PAGE

PRELUDE 3

THE THREE B'S 19

Bach at Bethlehem (May, 1923) 19



Two Days of Bach 24

(Interlude) 27

Beethoven 33

Old Ludwig and his Ways 39

Beethoveniana 41

(Interlude) 43

Brahms 45

MORE OF THE MASTERS 51

Schubert 5*

Schubert 57

Wagner (Symbiosis and the Artist) 63

Wagner (The Eternal Farce) 66

Franz Joseph Haydn 67

xii Contents

Johann Strauss 76

Schumann (O, Fruehling, Wie Bist Du So Schoenl)8o

Mendelssohn 89

Dvofik (An American Symphony) 91

OPERAS AND OPERETTAS 101

Opera 101

Grand Opera in English 104

The Tower Duet in II Trcvatore 106

The Mikado 107

The Passing of Gilbert 112

Pinafore at 33 114

BAND MUSIC 117

Italian Bands 117

Wind Music 121

TEMPO DI VALSE 126

WEDDING MUSIC 128

New Wedding March Needed 128

Enter the Church Organist 130

CATHOLIC CHURCH MUSIC 132

NATIONAL MUSIC 135

English Songs 135

Russian Music 137

POPULAR SONGS OF THE PLAIN PEOPLE 142

A Plea for the Old Songs 142

The Folk-Song 144

American Folk-Song 147

The Music of the American Negro 149

Contents xiii

MUSIC AND OTHER VICES 155

Virtuous Vandalism 155

Music After the War 158

MORE REVIEWS 163

Ernest Newman and Others 163

The Poet and the Scientist 166

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD 173

Music as a Trade 173

The Reward of the Artist 175

LITTLE CONCERT-HALLS 176

"LIGHT" MOTIFS 182

On Tenors'

182

Mysteries of the Tone-Art 183

Masters of Tone 185

MORALS AND MUSIC 186

Music and Sin 186

The Music-Lover 189

POTPOURRI 191

MUSICAL ALLUSIONS TO AUTHORS 195

FROM A LETTER TO ISAAC GOLDBERG 197

POSTLUDE (The Saturday Night Club) 207

VALE The End of a Happy Life 216

INDEX of Composers and Performers follows page 222

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE i H. L. Mencken at home on Rollins Street,

Baltimore, 1928 FRONTISPIECE

FACING PAGE

n An arrangement by Mencken (around 1902 )

of Beethoven's Symphony No. I 44

m One of several versions of Mencken's setting

for voice and piano to William Watson's

poem "April" 45

iv Death Mask of Beethoven and music in the

brick garden wall built by Henry Mencken,

in the back yard of his home 76

v Mencken singing with a quartet from the

pressroom and composing-room at a Christ-

mas party, Sun office 77

vi Saturday Night Club members and guests

(November, 1913) 1Q8

vn Members and guests of the Saturday Night

Club at the 5oth birthday party for Folger

McKinsey, August 29, 1916 109

xvi Illustrations

vm Music session of the Saturday Night Club,

April, 1937 140

DC Saturday Night Club room at Schellhase's

restaurant on Howard Street, April, 1937 141

x Enoch Pratt Free Library's window display

of some of the music from the Saturday

Night Club's library 172

PRELUDE

PRELUDE

LOUIS CHESLOCK

Music is SAID to have been Henry Mencken's hobby. This

is true. But it is true only in the sense that he never played

music professionally. For music was to him something more

than a mere hobby.

Even as a youngster he was possessed of a number of

strong creative urges which found their outlets in poetry,

story and play writing, experiments in chemistry, drawing,

and water-color painting. But music was not only his first

true love, it was, indeed, the wellspring of his life though

not of his livelihood.

The closest he ever came to performing professionally was

sometime in 1933. He was invited by the owner of the Rex

Theater, a movie house in Baltimore, then opening, to ap-

pear as solo pianist during the intermission of the premiere

and at a good fee! Of course, he turned it down. In con-

nection with printed music, his name appears twice as

author of the lyrics of popular songs: "That's His Business"

(1900), music by Julian K. Schaefer, and 'The End of it

AIT (1904), music by Joseph H. CaUahan. Also, Franz

Bornschein made settings for male chorus of two poems

4 Prelude

from Ventures into Verse, by Mencken: "Arabesque"

(1919) and "Ships in Harbor"' (1923) . But it would be im-

possible to tabulate the span of time he spent in utmost de-

light at the piano keyboard, or to reckon the reams of music

sheets he filled with his tonal aspirations.

Music is my profession. In my lifelong occupation as com-

poser, performer, and teacher, I have been in close associa-

tion with countless musical personalities, ranging from be-

ginning students, through enlightened amateurs, to world-

renowned practitioners. It is my belief that no one I ever

knew loved music more than Mencken. How very deep-

rooted was his feeling for the tonal art is best expressed by

himself. From his book, Happy Days (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf; 1940), I select the following few sentences: "Mylack of sound musical instruction was really the great dep-

rivation of my life. When I think of anything properly

describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of

music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000

words in English, and continue to this day to pour out

more and more. But all the same I shall die an inarticulate

man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only

vaguely and speak only like a child."

Music dominated his thinking. A vast number of his non-

musical articles bear titles, expressions, references, and

comparisons using music terminology.2 The highest compli-

2 A few examples: "A Symphony" (actuaDy an ode to Marylandvictuals complete wiih Introduction, Allegro, Larghetto, and Fi-

nale!), "Discords in the Harmony'* (a comparison of TheodoreRoosevelt and WiDiam Jennings Bryan), "Decay of a Violin" (de-cline of Uncle Joe Cannon).

Prelude 5

ment he could pay any author was to collate his writing with

music. "Reading Cabell, one gets a sense of a flow of

harmonious sound. The inner ear responds to a movement

that is subtly correct and satisfying. . . . In Cabell there is

vastly more than juicy three-four time." A comment on

Joseph Conrad's style: "But even speculation could be borne

if it ended in discovery if the final chord was the comfort-

ing tonic of C major. But it never is. Nine times out of ten

it is a discord without resolution." Of Shakespeare: "A

sound sonnet is almost as pleasing an object as a well-written

fugue. . . . His music was magnificent, he played superbly

upon all the common emotions and he did it magnifi-

cently, he did it with an air."

He had said: "The world presents itself to me, not chiefly

as a complex of visual sensations, but as a complex of aural

sensations." The sound of tones was to him a lifetime tonic;

a soft voice was an almost inexpressible joy. I recall his

particular rapture in the singular sound of children prac-

ticing piano.

A search through the Mencken ancestry, tracing the line

back for more than four hundred years, reveals no evidence

or record of a musician in the family. One finds rich mer-

chants, distinguished professors, Doctors of Law, Rectors of

Leipzig University, an Archpresbyter of the Cathedral of

Marienwerder, notable authors and erudite editors; a mem-

ber of the Royal Society, a Privy Councilor to August the

Strong, a Private Secretary to Frederick the Great, a mem-

ber of the nobility. However, music having been for cen-

turies a strong factor in the German culture, it can readily

6 Prelude

be conjectured that it played a role in the lives of most, if

not all. Dr. Otto Mencke 3

(1644-1707) was probably the

first of the line to change his occupation from commerce to

that of learning. He founded and edited the first journal of

learning in Germany, Acta Eruditorum. He was a professor

and later also became Rector at the University of Leipzig.

Liider Mencke (1658-1726), cousin of Dr. Otto

Mencke, was Royal Councilor, and he, too, became Rector

of Leipzig University. He was made head of the municipal

council committee of the ancient Thomasschule, and it was

he who engaged Johann Sebastian Bach in 1723 to supply

music to its school and several churches. Bach spent the

final 27 years of his life as teacher, organist, composer, choir

director and orchestra conductor in its principal church, the

Thomaskirche. Here the Leipzig Menckens worshipped, and

here also, in this church, is a beautiful Mencken Memorial

window, exactly under Old Bach's choir loftl

Anastasius Menckenius (1752-1801) was Private Sec-

retary to Frederick the Great, where, incidentally, Bach's

son Karl Philipp Emanuel was, from 1740 to 1767, a court

musician and accompanist to Frederick's flute playing.

Anastasius married a wealthy widow in 1785, and to the

couple was born a son and a daughter. The daughter, in-

heriting her mother's beauty and fortune, became the dar-

ling of Potsdam. Charming Luise Wilhelmine Mencken

(1789-1839), married Captain Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand

8 Mencke is the original spelling of the surname. Later, accord-

ing to the custom, it was Latinized to Menckenius. When restored

to German, the second n was retained.

Prelude 7

von Bismark, and nine years later became the mother of

Karl Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismark, Germany's famous

"Iron Chancellor."

Henry Mencken's was a wholehearted and infectious

enthusiasm for music, very probably engendered in him in

his early childhood by his father. His father, August, was

an ardent music lover. He had been given some instruction

in violin playing when he was a boy,4but gave up when he

discovered he was a "monotone" and possibly "tone-deaf."

The fascination of tones, however, never left him. Occasion-

ally, but in seclusion, he would try fiddling over his tour de

force, "Yankee Doodle." But for more reliable musical

rendition he purchased an elaborate Swiss ten-tune music

box an import in great vogue in those days. It had a name

The Sublime Harmonie! Besides the pin-encrusted

cylinder record, it came equipped with bells, drums, and

zither. Its program consisted of folk songs, mazurkas, polkas,

and waltzes.

At Friederich Knapp's Institute, a private school in Balti-

more where Mencken began his education, the day was

always started with singing. Most of the songs were favorite

German folk songs, disciplinarian Herr Knapp leading the

assembled classes playing on his violin, and his beautiful

daughter Bertha accompanying on a parlor organ. In later

life Mencken frequently declared a dislike for singing and

singers, especially the singing of tenors. But actually, and

at the very most, he may have disliked hearing solo singing.

41 have one of his instruction books Mazas' "Violin Method,"

so designated in Henry's handwriting on the flyleaf.

8 Prelude

And what his father may have missed in effect upon him

with his violin Heir Knapp must surely have fulfilled with

his fiddle, for "the sound of horse-hair on catgut" moved

him deeply throughout his life.

Very shortly after the turn of the New Year of 1888,

Mencken's father had delivered to his home a shining new,

black Stieff square piano. Henry, then eight,5 and his brother

Charles, twenty months younger, had their first lessons from

a Mr. Maas. The professor was actually the bookkeeper in

their father's cigar factory. But knowing something of the

mysteries of manipulating the ivory keyboard, he was en-

gaged to give the boys instruction twice a week. For basic

technique, Peter's Eclectic Pianoforte Instructor and

Beyer's Preliminary School for Piano-Forte were assigned.

Shortly after these, for Henry, there followed Czerny's

School of Velocity, for which opus he had an especial ha-

tred. Nevertheless, Mr. Maas had his pupils very well along

the road to Parnassus in considerably less than a year, at

about which time a persistent chest ailment claimed the

kindly bookkeeper-musician. Mencken remembered the

maestro as an affable and capable man, but even more he

recalled his spectacular beard. It was not only extraordinary

in size, but it was combed fantastically straight to each side

from the middle, in order to cover a pair of slender shoul-

ders.

5 For more than fifty years Mencken believed that at age six hewas an accomplished pianist for a youngster. In delving throughsome family papers years after his parents had died, he discovered

a receipt for the piano dated January 13, 1888, putting his be-

ginning lessons when he was two years older.

Prelude 9

Upon the passing of the professor, Mencken's brother

Charles stopped taking music lessons, but Henry continued

with a new teacher, Miss Lillie Mezger. She was sincerely in-

terested in her charge. The Pratt Library in Baltimore has in

its Mencken Room a Christmas gift of a book, Children's

Thoughts in Song and Story, inscribed by her to Harry

(as he was spoken of in the family) Menken! His first

pieces (following the local taste of the time) were such art-

works as "Blue Bird Schottische" and "Papa's Waltz"! For

what reason Miss Mezger was succeeded by other teachers I

do not know; perhaps she married. Following her, however,

came a procession of pediculous lady pedagogues. From one

of these, in the course of time, Mencken's sister, Gertrude,

twenty months younger than her brother Charles, also had

some lessons. She did not continue for long. Henry, alone,

persevered despite the efforts of his teachers at debasement

of both his taste and technique with such ordure as "Black

Key Polka," "Monastery Bells," "La CMtelaine," etc.

In those days, as too often, unfortunately, in these days,

"taking piano lessons" meant precisely that! Even the most

elementary details of what the music was made of was com-

pletely ignored by the "lady Leschetizkys." What signifi-

cance sharps or flats had, which were placed at the head of

the staff, was an enigma to the pupil and perhaps also the

teacher. Major key minor key? Major chord minor

chord? Terms phrase form, of what concern could these

possibly be? Hand position, fingering, and "pieces" were

what the tuition was for. Nevertheless, by the time he was

ten Henry had gained sufficient skill to be called upon

io Prelude

frequently to perform for the guests of his parents. His

sight-reading ability and repertoire were growing apace. Al-

though a bit of Beethoven and Mozart had crept into his

list of pieces, the treasury, in the main, consisted of

mazurkas, polkas, schottisches and waltzes. In time his

sphere as performer was enlarged to appearances as pianist

at dancing parties in the homes of his friends. Soon his

lessons also stopped, but the playing continued. On his own

initiative, he persisted in practicing the odious technical

exercises.

Although basic theory was still a matter of the future,

young Henry, at twelve, had a keen curiosity about it. Also,

the urge to compose began to manifest itself. His first piece,

neatly written in ink, was a very short "Two-Step" for

piano. The next opus, also for piano, but written in pencil,

was inscribed at the top, "Tempo di Marchia."6 Then came

a number of waltzes and marches. At the age of fifteen,

while a student at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, he

composed the score for a musical comedy which was pro-

duced in the school, and for which he was also librettist and

acted as pianist in the orchestra pit. All of these creations,

naturally, were the products of trial and error at the key-

board.

On January 13, 1899, Mencken's father died, at the age

of forty-five. His namesake and youngest of the four chil-

dren was then not yet ten. It was the father's influence

6 These and others of his early efforts are in the Mencken Roomat the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore. The calligraphy on all

of them looks very nearly professional.

Prelude 11

which generated in the children the love of music, and nowit was gone. Young August never had music instruction.

Very shortly after his father's death Mencken became a

cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, the Herdd. Beinga reporter in those days meant working twelve hours a day,

minimum, six days a week. Any unfinished work had

to be cleared on the so-called "free day." His progress on the

paper was astonishingly rapid. There was precious little time

left to indulge in composing or for study of the tone art.

However, as he got to know the members of the staff more

intimately, he discovered to his great delight that a number

of them had more than a casual interest in music. The

assistant sporting editor, Emanuel Daniel, played the violin.

He was variously known as "Schmool," "Schmool

Daniel,'' and "Manuel Daniel." Night editor Isador Good-

man played the flute. He had formerly played flute pro-

fessionally in a circus band. His girl was a singer. It was not

long before there were evening meetings to concert their

musical efforts. The flute tootling turned out to be poor, the

poor girl's singing even worse, so Mencken drowned them

out with his stentorian touch. Amiable reporter Lew

Schaefer was also a composer of sorts. He had a flair for

writing piano pieces for children and revealed each new in-

spiration to his friend, Henry Mencken.

At the dose of 1900, thirty-two-year-old Robert I. Carter

came from Cincinnati to become the new managing editor

of the Herdd. Extremely able in his profession and deeply

interested and thoroughly seasoned in all the fine arts

most especially in music and the drama young reporter

12 Prelude

Mencken was soon strongly attracted to him. From him he

first heard about the fine points in the music of Schubert and

Schumann. It was he who first told him about Ibsen and

Shaw. From him he learned considerably about the sub-

tleties in craftsmanship of writing and absorbed much of his

discriminating taste. Here, indeed, was a gold mine of cul-

ture. For his part, Carter at once sensed the immense talents

of his prot6g6 and gave him every possible incentive and en-

couragement. In 1901 he appointed Mencken SundayEditor of the Herdd. At the end of 1902 Carter left Balti-

more to become managing editor of the New York Herald.

But the impact of his guidance and influence on HenryMencken during his brief two-year stay was incalculable.

Also on the Herald staff was the Englishman, Owst, as

music critic. Wilberfoss G. Owst was a product of typical

European rigid and routine drill of those days. He was a

well of music theory and "an abyss of thorough-bass." From

him Mencken had some help in harmony and heard much

abuse of the music of Brahms.7 But Irishman Joseph Calla-

han, Mencken's assistant, whose violation of the violin was

almost matchless, was nevertheless a genuine lover of music.

Besides, he knew a number of the city's professional and

better amateur musicians. It was he who introduced

Mencken to many who were to become his lifelong friends

through music. The music making and music discussions of

his new friends proved to be enchanting and enlightening.

Owst had little taste for the lesser and countless concerts

7 See page 209 in the Postiude.

Prelude 13

then going on in the city. Most of these were organ recitals

in remote churches, vocal and instrumental recitals in clubs

and lodges, choral and orchestral concerts in the manyGerman music societies, and concerts by Italian bands,

which abounded in Baltimore. The repertoires were far from

varied, and far also from first quality. Mencken was bor-

rowed" from the daily city editor and assigned to review

or report them. The new head of the Herdd thought well

of his work in this field and, by way of recognition, added a

theater roll to his list of duties covering plays, operas, and

operettas.

There was no extra pay for the junior critic's services, nor

any time allowances made from his regular reporting or

editing jobs for the extra evening hours of employment.

The concerts and plays were compensation enough. To

supplement his meager income of the period, he found

time somehow to do an amazing amount of pot-boiler work

brochures for a local piano manufacturer, tracts for one

of the town's doctors, pamphlets for a large department

store, prefaces to books, and what not!

Mencken managed to get in a few more piano lessons,

but his real knowledge of music came mainly from reading.

From this time on he accumulated books on orchestration,

counterpoint, harmony and history of music, and pocket

scores of orchestral works. The materials which he gathered

then and during the rest of his life are of the very highest

quality. This I know at first hand, as he generously left all

his music, music books, and recordings to me. In this fine

and comprehensive collection are the most representative

14 Prelude

works of the foremost musical scholars and composers of

the era.

Here, then, was Mencken shortly after the turn of the

century, in his early twenties. Despite his heavy hours at

work in journalism, his inherent love of music kept his

interest bubbling over. In whatever spare time he had he

kept studying the music, playing the music, discussing the

music, writing on music, and, indeed, composing and ar-

ranging music during the incidental periods of the short-

lived day. From his own Ventures Into Verse he made a

partially completed vocal setting of one of his poems, a

"Madrigal." For William Watson's poem, "April," he not

only completed a voice and piano setting, but made several

versions. There are numerous other solo pieces, also some

trios for violin, 'cello, and piano. His musical "composi-

tions," naturally, must be regarded as the strivings of his

sporadic schooling, and set against the musical background

of the town of that time.

In 1904 the city of Baltimore suffered a catastrophic fire,

destroying eighty-six blocks in the heart of the city. Amongthe casualties was the Herdd, and with it many of

Mencken's earliest efforts in journalism. Publication of the

paper continued for a while in a temporary relocation, but

the struggle for survival was futile, and finally, on June 18,

1906, it collapsed. Mencken had little difficulty in quickly

obtaining a new job. He was sought by the editors of the

three remaining local papers. For a few weeks he went with

the Evening News but quit it to go to the Sunpapers.

Five years later he was given a column of his own, begun

Prelude 15

on May 8, 1911, as the "World in Review." The next day

he changed its name to the "Free Lance." Into this column,

for more than four years, he poured a tremendous variety

of his concepts; and it gained for him a widespread fame.

In addition, he wrote extended Monday Editorials for the

Evening Sun, as well as numerous special articles. He wrote

also for the Chicago Tribune, the New York Evening Mail,

the New York American, and a number of other news-

papers. In the ensuing years, book after book of his began

to appear along with his editorship of the Smart Set and

American Mercury magazines. Because of the extremely

wide range of his writings, especially in the magazines, he

used a great number of pseudonyms in fact, a total of

twenty-eight! But only rarely did he use one of them when

writing articles about music: for brief reviews of phono-

graph records, etc., he sometimes used the pen name of

Atwood C. Bellamy.

Henry Mencken regarded his profession as "critic of

ideas." His thoughts are widely known on a great variety

of subjects: literature, politics, language, religion, medicine,

etc. Generally less known are his articles on music. Some of

these, although half a century old and more, retain a remark-

able freshness and pertinence, and contain lucid accounts of

the state of music in Baltimore (ergo, the U.S.) at the turn

of the century. His writing had at all times a uniqueness of

expression and exceptional penetration, besides being enter-

taining and informative.

The following articles appear as Mencken wrote them,

and are headed with the sources from which they are se-

16 Prelude

lected. Some he himself condensed and a very few I did also,

in order to avoid some repetition. Taking note of the dates

on them, one can perceive his progress from venturesome

young reporter to erudite critic, whose sound observations

and practical ideas still hold good, in many instances, to this

day. One should be careful to distinguish between his

spoofing and his seriousness; but even in his humor there is a

remarkable residue of sage and valuable criticism. I have

kept comment on the articles (in footnotes) to a minimum,and only for the purpose of relating some point to the pres-

ent or setting straight some oversight. These footnotes and

the sections without source headings (Prelude, Interludes,

and Postiude) are by me.

Baltimore, Maryland 1960

H-L-MENCKENON MUSIC

THE THREE B'S

Bach

(1685-1750)

BACH AT BETHLEHEM 1

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 30, 1923.

Included in A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY, 1949, pp. 543-4.

A DUSTY, bottle-green hillside rising from a river front made

harsh and hideous by long lines of blast furnaces; the sun-

shine blazing down through a haze shot through with wisps

of golden orange smoke. Thick woods all the way to the

top. In the midst of the solid leafage, rather less than half

way up, half a dozen stretches of dingy granite, like out-

croppings of the natural rock. Coming closer, one discovers

that they are long, bare, stone buildings laboratories, dor-

1 Mencken attended many of the Bach Festivals at Bethlehem,

Pennsylvania, during the great days of Director Dr. Wolle. Hewent always with a friend at first with Joseph Hergesheuner, and

later often with Alfred A. Knopf. After what was probably his first

visit there, in the spring of 1923, he wrote to Knopf: "The Bach

jaunt turned out to be very pleasant. We found excellent beer on

draught at ten cents a glass. The choruses were superb, but the

solo voices singed my kidneys/'

20 H. L. Mencken ON Music

mitories, and so on of Lehigh University. Low down the

hillside one of them stands up more boldly than the rest

It is Parker Memorial Church, a huge tabernacle in austere,

apologetic pseudo-Gothic, with a high square tower the

chapel, in brief, of the university, made wide and deep to

hold the whole student body at once, and so save the rev.

chaplain the labor of preaching twice.

It is here that the Bach Choir, for years past has been

lifting its hosannas to old Johann Sebastian a curious

scene, in more ways than one, for so solemn and ecstatic a

ceremonial. Bethlehem, in the main, surely does not suggest

the art of the fugue, nor, indeed, any form of art at all.

It is a town founded mainly on steel, and it looks ap-

propriately hard and brisk a town, one guesses instantly,

in which -'Rotarians are not without honor, and the NewYork Times is read far more than Anatole France. But, as

the judicious have observed in all ages, it is hazardous to

fudge by surfaces. Long before the first steel mill rose by the

river, the country all about was peopled by simple Moravians

with a zest for praising God by measure, and far back in

1742 they set up a Singakademie and began practising

German psalm-tunes on Saturday nights. The great-great-

grandchild of that Singakademie is the Bethlehem Bach

Choir of today.

What, indeed, is most astonishing about the whole festi-

val is not that it is given in a Pennsylvania steel town, with

the snorting of switching-engines breaking in upon Bach's

colossal "Gloria," but that it is still, after all these years,

so thoroughly peasant-like and Moravian, so full of home-

Bach at Bethkhem 2 1

liness and rusticity. In all my life I have never attended a

public show of any sort, in any country, of a more complete

and charming simplicity. With strangers crowding into the

little city from all directions, and two takers for every seat,

and long columns of gabble in the newspapers, the tempta-

tion to throw some hocus-pocus about it, to give it a certain

florid gaudiness, to bedeck it with bombast and highfalutin

must be very trying, even to Moravians. But I can only say

that they resist the temptation utterly and absolutely. There

is no affectation about it whatever, not even the affecta-

tion of solemn religious purpose. Bach is sung in that

smoky valley because the people like to sing him, and for no

other reason at all. The singers are businessmen and their

stenographers, schoolmasters and housewives, men who

work in the steel mills and girls waiting to be married. If

not a soul came in from outside to hear the music, they

would keep on making it just the same, and if the Parker

Memorial Church began to disturb them with echoes from

empty benches they would go back to their bare Moravian

church.

I can imagine no great public ceremonial with less fuss to

it. No committee swathed in badges buzzes about; there is

none of the usual sweating, fuming and chasing of tails.

If one has a ticket, one simply goes to one's pew, plainly

numbered on a simple plan, and sits down. If one lacks a

ticket, one is quite free to lie in the grass outside, and listen

to the music through the open doors. No bawling of hawk-

ers is heard; a single small stand suffices for the sale of pro-

grams and scores; there is no effort to rook the stranger.


The cops have nothing to do save tangle the light traffic;

there is no confusion, no parade, no noise save from the

railroad yards. The conductor slips into his place un-

noticed; when a session is over he slips out the same way.

It is indeed not a public performance at all, in the custom-

ary sense; it is simply the last of this year's rehearsals

and as soon as it is over next year's begin.

BACH AT BETHLEHEM

Extracted from the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 21, 1928.

. . . THE MEMBERS of the Bach Choir know the B minor

Mass so well that their mere singing of the notes is com-

pletely perfect. They never make a ragged entrance and they

never waver in tempo. Director John Frederick Wolle is so

adept at his drillmaster's job that by the time he steps into

his pulpit he is scarcely needed any longer. Unless my eyes

and ears gravely deceived me a week ago, I once detected

him waving his arms he uses no baton off the beat. But

the choir kept on singing in perfect time. It would keep on

singing in perfect time if the steel mills across the river

blew up, and the steeple of the festival church began to

wobble. Its pianissimos are worth going miles to hear, and

when it cuts loose in a forte the very firmament trembles.

The accompanying orchestra always suffers greatly by

comparison. There is no orchestra of any size in Bethlehem,

and so union men have to be brought in from Philadelphia

or New York. This year they came from the New York

Symphony. In the main, they did well enough, but some

Bach at Bethlehem 2 3

of the sounds that came from their first trumpet were ex-

tremely disquieting. For a while, indeed, I labored under

the delusion that a stupendous B flat clarinet had been

introduced into the orchestra, and that it was being played

by steam. But such unhappiness had better be forgotten.

The Bach scores are immensely difficult, and playing them

without adequate rehearsals is surely no enviable job. . . .

BACH AT BETHLEHEM


. . . THE SINGING of Johann Sebastian Bach's music at

Bethlehem, Pa., goes back to 1742, when the Moravians

who had settled there held their first Singstunde, but in its

present form the Bach Choir is but thirty years old. . . .

Its perfections, indeed, are seldom matched, even by much

better choirs. Its attack shows an almost mathematical

precision, and its divagations from pitch are so rare and in-

considerable as to be unnoticeable. When it tackles a

diminuendo the fall in sound is beautifully dear and

smooth, and when it has a chance to roar it makes the

whole Lehigh Valley ring. In all its singing there is tre-

mendous gusto. The occasional hired soloists, mainly bad,

suffer vastly by contrast. They do their best but it is usually

no more than the best of honest union workmen. The

choristers plainly sing because they enjoy it. ... The choir

has sung the B minor Mass 21 times since 1900. It is the

annual ptece de resistance and occupies both sessions of the

second day. Naturally enough, it is sung much better than


the things which occupy the first day usually either the

John or Matthew Passions or a series of cantatas. This year

the Matthew Passion was done not badly, to be sure, but

still without any distinction. A hired tenor struggled

bravely with the long recitatives, but they are essentially

unsingable, and so his efforts were more painful than ex-

hilarating. The words of Jesus were sung by the basses in

unison a series of low rumbles, seldom rising to music.

The best singing was in the chorales.

In the mass all the solo parts are sung by the appropriate

sections of the choir, and so the effect is far better. This

year I heard the mass for the third time at Bethlehem, and

it seemed to me to be done almost perfectly. The Gloria

and the Sanctus were almost overwhelming: it is impossible

to imagine anyone with ears sitting unmoved before such

stupendous music, so superbly sung. There was magnificent

singing, too, in the extraordinarily difficult Et In Unum

Dominum, for the two women's choirs alone. This duet

makes heavy demands upon singers, orchestra and conduc-

tor. All three helped to make it perfect and glorious. . . .

TWO DAYS OF BACH


. . . THIS YEAR'S performance, in some ways, was better

than usual, and in other ways it was worse. The chorus, it

seemed to me, showed a certain weakness, especially in the

tenor and alto sections. I suppose the tenor voice is not

Two Days of Bach 25

natural to Pennsylvania Germans; at all events, they do

much better as basses. As for the altos, they suffer by the

fact that, in general, they seem to be somewhat older than

the sopranos; thus the singing of the latter shows more

freshness, always an important element in female warbling.

But all hands whatever their natural defects, yet sing with

complete enthusiasm and remarkable skill. The attack of the

choir is as sharp as a sword-stroke; it responds to its leader

perfectly; it never wanders from the key.

There have been times in the past when the B minor

Mass was badly damaged by a bad orchestral accompani-

ment, but this year the boys of the union all of them, I be-

lieve, from the Philadelphia Orchestra played superbly.

Such lovely tones as came from the oboe, the first flute, the

horns and the trumpets are seldom heard in this world. Nor

must I forget the excellent piano accompaniment of Miss

Pauline Detterer in the cantatas, or the good work of the

two brethren who played bull-fiddles a most important

matter in doing Bach.

Of the soloists the only one who achieved any genuine

glory was the bass, Charles Trowbridge Tittmann, of Wash-

ington. He is now an old hand at Bethlehem, and sings the

fiendishly difficult music of the cantatas with ease and

authority. He has a big voice, and is not overwhelmed, as

his tenor colleagues almost always are, by contrast with the

great blast of the chorus. Unluckily, the English words used

in the cantatas are completely idiotic, and Mr. Tittmann

often had to sing such stuff as this:


Sergeant! Hett-horror!

Dost not feel terror?

The music to this drivel is magnificent, but the words will

not down. As for me, I'd much prefer to hear Dr. Tittmann

sing "Im Tiefen Keller." The lady soloists have even worse

to sing. In the cantata called "Wir miissen durch viel

Triibsar the contralto must struggle with this:

I'd fain earthward instantfly.

Idle Mammon, hence from me!

Alas, the German original is almost as bad! In the same

cantata the soprano gets a far better break. The words she

has to sing are almost intelligent, and the accompaniment

by flute and oboe is unutterably charming. This aria was

sung by Mrs. Ernestine Hohl Eberhard, a member of the

choir.

On the first day of the two-day festival Dr. Wolle put on

nine cantatas a somewhat heavy dose. Bach wrote 200

altogether, and every one of them, in some way or other, is

beautiful, but they tend to seem monotonous when

strung in a chain, and the difficulties of the music, especially

to the soloists, are accentuated. Some of the arias are really

almost unsingable; even a piccolo player, tackling them,would get out of breath. The chorales go better. Dr. Wolle

prints the tunes in his programme, has the audience rise

when they are sung, and evidently expects it to join in. This

year it stood mute, though most of the tunes are quite sim-

ple. But it always leaped up with alacrity, plainly glad to getoff the hard church benches for a few minutes. . . .

(Interlude) 27

(Interlude)

IT is RECOGNIZED, historically, that the epitome of court-

liness and charm in music was reached in the sym-

phonic works of Mozart and Haydn. It is true, to a

certain extent, that Beethoven's first two symphonieslink onto the music of these masters. But with the

birth of the Eroica there came a cleavage of colossal

force and abruptness. Music was forever turned to its

new course. At long last it was taken away from the

effete few mainly royalty and given to all mankind.

Immediately, within the opening few measures of the

Eroicd, one is aware of being in the presence of a deep-

feeling, humane, and powerful personality. No longer

now the formalized, "correct" harmonic progressions,

but instead, dramatic successions to stormy and ex-

plosive impacts of daringly dissonant climaxes. Con-

sider the boldness of this Beethoven work. Every con-

stituent element in the complex of music is pushed

and driven to further frontiers. At the summit of the

climax of the first movement, and in full force,

Beethoven sounds an inverted, shrieking seventh chord

of F-A-C-E, and tops it off in the flutes with the dis-

sonant E and F wedded to each otherl At the junction

of the development and recapitulation, even though

marked pianissimo, the tonic chord of E flat clashes

against its dominant seventh. Contemplate the rugged-

ness of the rhythms, and the vividness of the dynamics.

The unexpected and dazzling modulations actually

28 (Interlude)

shocked the venturesome Viennese of the first audi-

ence. It was considered to be a composition which

"lost itself in lawlessness"! Nevertheless, they felt com-

pelled to remain and listen to this completely uncon-

ventional music, despite their resentment, because it

was certainly evident to them that Beethoven had

something of vast importance to say, and was saying

it! But the reaction did not die down soon. It lasted

for more than half a century. How full of error are

these sample comments of the times:

From a letter by a Viennese to the Leipzig paper,

Allegemeine Musicdische Zeitung, February 13, 1805,

following a private concert in the home of Prince

Lobkowitz: "The writer belongs to Beethoven's warm-

est admirers, but in the present work (Eroica sym-

phony) he finds very much that is odd and harsh,

enormously increasing in difficulty of comprehensionof the music, and obscuring its unity almost entirely/'

The critic of the Vienna paper, Freymiithige, follow-

ing the first public performance of the work on Sunday,

April 7, 1805, in the Theatre-an-der-Wien, said, amongother things: 'The connection is often disrupted en-

tirely, and the inordinate length of this longest,2and

perhaps most difficult of all symphonies, wearies even

the cognoscenti, and is unendurable to the mere music-

lover. It fears that if Beethoven continues on his pres-

2 To the many complaints that his symphony was of too greatlength, Beethoven retorted: "If I write a symphony an hour longit will be found short enough!"

(Interlude) 29

ent path both he and the public will be the sufferers.

The public and Herr van Beethoven, who conducted,

were not satisfied with each other this evening: the

public thought the symphony too heavy, too long, and

Beethoven himself, too discourteous, because he did

not nod his head in recognition of the applause which

came from a portion of the audience."

At the first rehearsal of the symphony, Ferdinand

Ries, good friend and pupil of Beethoven, recalls: "In

the first Allegro occurs a wicked whim of Beethoven's

for the horn; in the second part, several measures before

the theme recurs in its entirety, Beethoven has the

horn suggest it at a place where the violins are still

holding a second chord. To one unfamiliar with the

score this must always sound as if the horn player had

made a miscount and entered at the wrong place. At

the rehearsal, which was horrible, but at which the horn

player made this entry correctly, I stood beside Bee-

thoven and, thinking that a blunder had been made, I

said: "Can't the damned hornist count? it sounds

infamously false!" I think I came pretty dose to re-

ceiving a box on the ear. Beethoven did not forgive

the slip for a long time."

Part of the first public audience felt that, "by means

of strange modulations and violent transitions, by com-

bining the most heterogeneous elements, as for instance

when a pastoral in the largest style is ripped up by the

basses, by three homs, etc., a certain undesirable origi-

nalitymay be achieved without much trouble."

3O (Interlude)

Schindler, Beethoven's companion and copyist, says

that it (the Eroica) was held in horror by Beethoven's

old enemy, Dionys Weber, head of the Conserv-

atorium at Prague, considering it a "dangerously im-

moral composition!"

Mencken's taste in music was universal in the fullest

sense. His predilection for the so-called "classics" was

natural and wholehearted. According to the mood or

occasion, however, he could appreciate with the same

genuineness Jerome Keni's "Old Man River," a Strauss

waltz, or a Rossini overture, as any extended opus of the

acknowledged "Masters." But of all the music he knew

and he knew amazingly much the one work he

most revered was Beethoven's Eroica symphony and,

in particular, the first movement.

In an article in the music magazine Etude of January,

1931, he was asked: "If you were assured by your

physician that you had only twenty-four more hours

to live and you were given the opportunity to hear just

one piece of music, what would you select?" His

reply, in part, was: "Your question is somewhat diffi-

cult. My first choice is the first movement of the

"Eroica" symphony, played by any good orchestra."

At the same time he admitted leaning heavily to

Schubert's quintette with the two 'cellos, as well as to

other music by Schubert; but felt "it would be a dread-

ful business to make that choice in actuality." Un-

doubtedly this was the most guarded statement of his

preference I have ever encountered. Unfailingly, in all

(Interlude) 31

his other expressions, there was only complete and

unbounded enthusiasm for Beethoven, the man and his

music and notably this opening movement of the

third symphony. Time and time again he stated, in the

printed and pronounced word, that this one piece was

to him the pinnacle of musical achievement. To ap-

preciate the full extent of his profound admiration for

this opus one must have heard him express himself

upon it. The apex of his ecstasy was reserved for this

work, and his voice was imbued with a warmth that

made his singing of the themes tingle with an inspired

and almost instrumental expressiveness. More as he

sang the music the burst and bounce on the sforzati

at the top of each climbing chord was a marvel to hear

and behold. The gesturing alone compared favorably

with the best of any of our present-day world-renowned

calisthenic orchestral conductors! And never in his

performance at the piano was the dynamic level irreso-

lute, as by nature and by habit he was not one to

"soft-pedal" anything!8

What was it then, and why was it that Beethoven

and in particular this piece fired in him such rapture?

My guess is that there is here a parallel affinity of per-

sonality and purpose. Both Beethoven and Mencken

were possessed with strong feelings of revolt against the

old order which existed in their respective creative

8 How Mencken became "a slave to the forte pedal" see 'The

Ruin of an Artist," in his book, Happy Days (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf; 1940, p. 193).

32 (Interlude)

fields. In the early era of each, only cliches and stock

sentiment succeeded and prevailed. Change was long

overdue in each instance. The time was ripe to turn to

new paths, and for the appearance of new pathfinders.

These leaders, besides being original, needed to be

hardy and without fear. And this, each in his own way,

was.

In the same sense that Beethoven was aware of the

language of sound, Mencken was aware of the sound of

language. In the same way that Beethoven would not

and could not conform to the threadbare conventions

of his art, neither could Mencken countenance the con-

tinuance of Victorianism in any of its forms. Both were

disturbers of complacency. They were bold, forthright,

and strong personalities. Both gave battle stormy,

vigorous, and even brutal. Neither cared whether what

he had to say was liked or not. Each, in his time,

obeyed the inevitable compulsion to say what he be-

lieved, and what he had been born to say. There was

no attempt to plush-cover the hammer-head. If a point

had to be driven home, then the steel had to be hard.

When each had ended his encounter the old order was

forever over, and a new sound was heard in the land!

Beethoven 33

Beethoven

(1770-1827)

From PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 87-94.

First printed in part in the Baltimore Evening Sim, April 24, 1922,

and in part in American Mercury, April, 1926, pp. 509-10,

also in A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY, 1949, pp. 523-7.

BEETHOVEN was one of those lucky men whose stature,

viewed in retrospect, grows steadily. How many movements

have there been to put him on the shelf? At least a dozen

in the hundred years since his death. There was one in NewYork in 1917, launched by idiot critics and supported by

war fever; his place, it appeared, was to be taken by such

prophets of the new enlightenment as Stravinsky. The net

result of that movement was simply that the best orchestra

in America went to pot and Beethoven survived un-

scathed. Surely the Nineteenth Century was not deficient

in master musicians. It produced Schubert, Schumann,

Chopin, Wagner and Brahms, to say nothing of a whole

horde of Dvo&ks, Tschaikowskys, Debussys, Verdis, and

Puccinis. Yet it gave us nothing better than the first move-

ment of the Eroica. That movement, the first challenge of

the new music^ remains its last word. It is the noblest piece

of absolute music ever written in sonata form, and it is the

noblest piece of programme music. In Beethoven, indeed,

the distinction between the two became purely imaginary.

Everything he wrote was, in a way, programme music, in-


duding even the first two symphonies, and everything was

absolute music.

It was a bizarre jest of the gods to pit Beethoven, in his

first days in Vienna, against Papa Haydn. Haydn was un-

deniably a genius of the first water, and, after Mozart's

death, had no apparent reason to fear a rival. If he did not

actually create the symphony as we know it today, then he

at least enriched the form with its first genuine masterpieces

and not with a scant few, but literally with dozens.

Tunes of the utmost loveliness gushed from him like oil

from a well. More, he knew how to manage them; he was a

master of musical architectonics. But when Beethoven

stepped in, poor old Papa had to step down. It was like

pitting a gazelle against a bull. One colossal bellow, and

the combat was over. Musicians are apt to look at it as a

mere contest of technicians. They point to the vastly greater

skill and ingenuity of Beethoven his firmer grip upon his

materials, his greater daring and resourcefulness, his far

better understanding of dynamics, rhythms and clang-tints

in brief, his tremendously superior musicianship. But that

was not what made him so much greater than Haydnfor Haydn, too, had his superiorities; for example, his far

readier inventiveness, his capacity for making better tunes.

What lifted Beethoven above the old master was simply his

greater dignity as a man. The feelings that Haydn put into

tone were the feelings of a country pastor, a rather civilized

stockbroker, a viola player gently mellowed by Kulmbachen

When he wept it was the tears of a woman who has dis-

covered another wrinkle; when he rejoiced it was with the

Beethoven 35

joy of a child on Christmas morning. But the feelings that

Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god.

There was something Olympian in his snarls and rages,

and there was a touch of hell-fire in his mirth.

It is almost a literal fact that there is no trace of cheapness

in the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and ro-

mantic; he never sheds conventional tears; he never strikes

orthodox attitudes. In his lightest moods there is the

immense and inescapable dignity of ancient prophets. Heconcerns himself, not with the transient agonies of romantic

love, but with the eternal tragedy of man. He is a great

tragic poet, and like all great tragic poets, he is obsessed bya sense of the inscrutable meaninglessness of life. From

the Eroica onward he seldom departs from that theme. It

roars through the first movement of tfie C minor, and it

comes to a stupendous final settlement in the Ninth. All

this, in his day, was new in music, and so it caused murmurs

of surprise and even indignation. The step from Mozarfs

Jupiter to the first movement of the Eroica was uncomfort-

able; the Viennese began to wriggle in their stalls. But there

was one among them who didn't wriggle, and that was

Franz Schubert. Turn to the first movement of his Un-

finished or to the slow movement of his Tragic, and you

will see how quickly the example of Beethoven was fol-

lowed and with what genius. There was a long hiatus after

that, but eventually the day of November 6, 1876, dawned in

Karlsruhe, and with it came the first performance of Brahms'

C minor. Once more the gods walked in the concert hall.

They will walk again when another Brahms is born, and not


before. For nothing can come out of an artist that is not in

the man. What ails the music of all the Tschaikowskys,

Mendelssohns and Gh'opins? What ails it is that it is the

music of shallow men.;^It is often, in its way, lovely. It

bristles withch^jgfti^g^musical

ideas. It is infinitely in-

genious and workmanlike. But it is hollow, at bottom, as a

bull by an archbishop. It is music of second-rate men.

Beethoven disdained all their artifices: he didn't need

them. It would be hard to think of a composer, even of the

fourth rate, who worked with thematic material of less

intrinsic merit. He borrowed tunes wherever he found

them; he made them up out of snatches of country jigs;

when he lacked one altogether he contented himself with

a simple phrase, a few banal notes. All such things he

viewed simply as raw materials; his interest was concen-

trated upon their use. To that use of them he brought the

appalling powers of his unrivalled genius. His ingenuity

began where that of other men left off. His most compli-

cated structures retained the overwhelming clarity of the

Parthenon. And into them he got a kind of feeling that even

the Greeks could not match; he was preeminently a modern

man, with all trace of the barbarian vanished. Into his

gorgeous music there went all of the high skepticism that

was of the essence of the Eighteenth Century, but into it

there also went a new enthusiasm, the new determination

to challenge and beat the gods, that dawned with the

Nineteenth.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most

portentous phenomenon in the whole history of music was

Beethoven 37

the first public performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805.

The manufacturers of programme notes have swathed that

gigantic work in so many layers of btoal legend and specula-

tion that its intrinsic merits have been almost forgotten.

Was it dedicated to Napoleon I? If s<v^s the dedication

sincere or ironical? Who cares that is, who with ears? It

might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV,

Paracelsus or Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discuss-

ing, today and forever, is the fact that on its very first page

Beethoven threw his hat into the ring and laid his claim to

immortality. Bang! and he is off. No compromise! No

easy bridge from the past! The second symphony is already

miles behind. A new order of music has been born. The

very manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking

into the foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming

introduction; no preparatory hemming and hawing to

cajole the audience and enable the conductor to find his

place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes the angry

crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause,

the first statement of the first subject grim, domineering,

harsh, raucous, and yet curiously lovely with its astound-

ing collision with that electrical C sharp. The carnage has

begun early; we are only in the seventh measure. In the

thirteenth and fourteenth comes the incomparable roll

down the simple scale of E flat and what follows is all that

has ever been said, perhaps all that ever will be said, about

music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward

done, even by Beethoven, was done in the light of that

perfect example. Every line of modern music that is honestly


music bears some sort of relation to that epoch-making first

movement.

The rest of the Eroica is Beethovenish, but not quintes-

sence. There is a legend that the funeral march was put in

simply because it was a time of wholesale butchery, and

funeral marches were in fashion. No doubt the first-night

audience in Vienna, shocked and addled by the piled-up

defiances of the first movement, found the lugubrious strains

grateful. But the scherzo? Another felonious assault upon

poor Papa Haydn! Two giants boxing clumsily, to a crazy

piping by an orchestra of dwarfs. No wonder some honest

Viennese in the gallery yelled: "I'd give another kreutzer

if the thing would stop!" Well, it stopped finally, and then

came something reassuring * theme with variations.

Everyone in Vienna knew and esteemed Beethoven's themes

with variations. He was, in fact, the rising master of themes

with variations in the town. But a joker remained in the

pack. The variations grew more and more complex and

surprising. Strange novelties got into them. The polite

exercises became tempestuous, moody, cacophonous, tragic.

At the end a harsh, hammering, exigent row of chords

the C minor symphony casting its sinister shadow before.

It must have been a great night in Vienna. But perhaps

not for the actual Viennese. They went to hear "a new

grand symphony in D sharp" (sic/). What they found

in the Theatre-an-der-Wien was a revolution.

Old Ludwig and his Ways 39

Old Ludwig and his WaysMencken's review of The Unconscious Beethoven, by Ernest Newman

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1927).

Appeared in American Mercury, June, 1927.

IN MR. NEWMAN'S judgment Beethoven's natural tendency

to turn his back upon the world was promoted by a

physical infirmity the syphilis that prevented his marriage,

and was the cause of his deafness and death. How he became

infected we don't know: probably as an incident of some

otherwise harmless youthful folly. But the fact of his infec-

tion seems to be quite plain, despite the effort of certain

sentimental German pathologists to talk it into improb-

ability. Beethoven unquestionably suffered from the malady

of kings, messiahs and philosophers, and it was chiefly re-

sponsible for his life-long unhappiness and his intense and

almost murderous misanthrophy. In particular it made him

a misogynist, especially when he had to deal with ladies

known to be of excessive amiability. That is why, according

to Mr. Newman, he hated the wives of his two brothers,

and wasted so much of his time and energy trying to do

them injury. He believed that they were loose, and that

their looseness was dangerous. Maintaining this thesis, he

often permitted his indignation to carry him beyond the

letter of the record, but there is every reason to believe that

the thesis itself was quite sound.

Beethoven, though certainly not a courtier, was never-

theless a man of honor: no bounder could have written his

incomparable music. The average musician of his time,

finding himself luetic by God's will, would have swallowed


a few pounds of mercury, and then affianced himself cheer-

fully to the first woman willing to marry him. But old Lud-

wig was strangely modern and scientific, beside having a

tender conscience, and so he refrained from connubial

bliss. His course did him honor, but made him very un-

happy. For there was probably never another man in the

world who needed the ministrations of an efficient German

wife as much as he did. He had absolutely no capacity for the

round of petty but invaluable tricks that make up the busi-

ness of housekeeping. He always forgot to have the windows

washed. He never remembered to change his shirt. He had

the fire roaring on hot days, and let it go out on cold days.

He managed servants by alternately over-paying them and

heaving crockery at them. So he lived like a pig all his days,

in the utmost mental and physical discomfort. His house-

hold was so forbidding that his nephew preferred suicide to

living in it. Worse, the poor fellow was always falling in love.

His heart went pitter-pat every time he saw a pretty girl,

which, in Vienna, was very often. Thus he became a

Freudian case, and led a life of almost unmitigated misery.

To that misery we must lay his sterile years, when he could

not write at all, and the lamentable fact that he wrote but

nine symphonies, to Mozart's thirty and Haydn's sixty.4

But to it, also, we must lay much of the splendor of what

he actually got upon paper. No healthy and happy mancould have matched it, for the gods are jealous of happiness,

and punish it with dullness. When, in the years to come,

some second Beethoven writes a piece of music as stupen-4Actually, Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, and Haydn, 104.

Beethoveniana 41

dous as the first movement of the Eroica, it will be found,

on inquiry, that he has lost his girl to a handsomer man,

and the chances are at least even that his Wassermann will

turn out to be positive.

Beethoveniana

Mencken's reviews of Beethoven the Creator, by Remain Rolland

(New York: Harper & Brothers; 1929)

and Beethoven, the Man -who Freed Music, by Robert Haven Schauffler

(Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company; 1929).

Appeared in American Mercury, December, 1929.

. . . M. ROLLAND, despite the size of his book makes no

effort to cover Beethoven's whole career. He begins with the

Eroica and ends with the "Fidelio" fiasco, surely a small

enough segment. Indeed, he discusses only three works at

any length: the Eroica, the Appassionata, and "Fidelio."

The last-named he puts far higher than any other critic

that I am aware of. He speaks of it as "the king-oak of the

forest", and deplores the fact that Wagner, "encumbered

with metaphysic", could not grasp its "grand and classical

humanity." It is, he says "the monument of a better Europe

of which, on the threshold of the Nineteenth Century,

Goethe and Beethoven had a glimpse, and that a hundred

years of subsequent torment have not been able to realize."

Following it, there appeared a demoniac element in Bee-

thoven's writing, especially in the Rasoumovsky quartettes,

and the "hinges of his soul" began to grate. It may be so, but

I must confess that the evidence is not altogether dear to

me. I am rather inclined to believe, indeed, that there is


quite as much of this demonism in the first movement of the

Eroica, and notably in the coda thereof, as you will find in

all that comes after, not forgetting even the last quartettes.

M. Holland is all for believing that Beethoven was made

deaf, not by anything so prosaic as microbes or their toxins,

but by the sheer power of his own genius. To support that

notion he resorts to the testimony of East Indian mystics

who say that they "come out of the spells of Yoga with eyes

red and bleeding, as if eaten by ants/' Old Ludwig, of

course, knew nothing of such spells, but when he sat down

to compose music "the hammering of the rhythm" and

"the sensuous heat of the orchestral color" worked much

the same effect upon him, and so his brain was heavily

battered, and his auditory centers began to disintegrate. It

is all very lovely, but my duty to my art compels me to add

that, with all due respect for M. Holland, it strikes me as

hard to distinguish from damned foolishness.

All the critics of Beethoven, alas, seem to be tempted to

such highfalutin stuff. Even Mr. SchaufBer shows the

stigma, though he is naturally a sober fellow, and his ac-

count of Beethoven's life is marked by a considerable com-

mon sense. It is when he essays to analyze the Master's

music that he begins to see things. What he sees chiefly

is a long series of recurring patterns. These he calls, at

different times, germ-motives or source-motives. That Bee-

thoven actually made use of them is of course familiar to

everyone, for a shining example glares at the world from the

first two measures of the C minor symphony. But that he

was at pains to stick them into everything he wrote, some-

(Interlude) 43

times so stealthily that it is hard to unearth them this

seems to me to be somewhat unlikely. The fact is that,

like any other composer, he had a natural weakness for

certain idioms, and that their appearance in his scores is

often evidence, not that he was trying to out-smart all

other composers, but simply that he was taking the easiest

way. In many cases those idioms were not his own in-

ventions, but came from the common store of music. That

Beethoven preferred this one to that one is probably true,

and that he used all of them with far greater skill than any-

one else is also true, but that he attached any esoteric

significance to them is highly improbable. Thus I find it

impossible to follow Mr. Schauffler all the way. But his

industry is certainly to be praised, and with it his genuine

delight in Beethoven. If his work accomplishes no other

good, it may at least induce other music-lovers to give hard

study to the scores. They well deserve it, for they are full of

gorgeous surprises and no man knows them so well com-

pletely.

(Interlude)

MENCKEN has often been compared with Shaw. In a

number of instances, their courses run parallel. One of

these coincidences was that as young journalists both

served as music critics for newspapers. The background

and equipment each brought to his task were not too

dissimilar. But in their appreciation of Brahms they

differed very widely, indeed!

Shaw had a real aversion to Brahms, the man as well

44 (Interlude)

as his music. He considered the composer possessed of

"a commonplace mind/' His music had "nothing

better in the way of ideas to express than incoherent

commonplace" "aberrations into pure stupidity"!

A few more of Shaw's pronouncements on Brahms

follow (from his week-to-week criticisms in The World,

London, 1890-93):

"There are some sacrifices which should not be de-

manded twice from any man; and one of them is listen-

ing to Brahms' Requiem. On some future evening,

perhaps, when the weather is balmy, and I can be

accommodated with a comfortable armchair, an inter-

esting book, and all the evening newspapers, I mayventure; but last week I should have required a requiem

for myself if I had attempted such a feat of endurance.

I am sorry to have to play the "disgruntled" critic over

a composition so learnedly contrapuntal, not to say

fugacious; but I really cannot stand Brahms as a serious

composer." (December 24, 1890)

"Brahms' Requiem has not the true funeral relish:

it aims at the technical traditions of requiem composi-

tion rather than the sensational, and is so execrably

and ponderously dull that the very flattest of funerals

would seem like a ballet, or at least a danse macabre

after it."

(November 9, 1892)

"I wonder what Mr. Statham would think of me if I

objected to Brahms' Requiem, not on the ground that

a

PLATE II An arrangement by Mencken for violin, 'cello,and

piano (around 1902) of Beethoven's Symphony No. I (fat move-

ment, measures 26 through 50)

O

4.

(ta

Brahms 45

it bores me to distraction, but as a violation of tbe laws

of nature."

(May 31, 1893)

And now, Mencken on Brahms . . .

Brahms

(1833-97)

From Five Little Excursions, PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 163-9.

First printed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, August 2, 1926.


MY EXCUSE for writing of the above gentleman is simply

that, at the moment, I can think of nothing else. A week or

so ago, on a Baltimore Summer evening of furious heat, I

heard his sextet for strings, opus 18, and ever since then it

has been sliding and pirouetting through my head. I have

gone to bed with it and I have got up with it. Not, of course,

with the whole sextet, nor even with any principal tune of

it, but with the modest and fragile little episode at the end

of the first section of the first movement a lowly thing

of nine measures, thrown off like a perfume, so to speak,

from the second subject.


What is the magic in such sublime trivialities? Here is a

tune so slight and unassuming that it runs to but nine

measures and uses but six of the twelve tones in the

octave, and yet it rides an elderly and unromantic man,

weighing 180 pounds and with a liver far beyond pills or

prayer, as if it were the very queen of the succubi. Is it be-

cause I have a delicately sensitive ear? Bosh! I am almost

tone-deaf. Or a tender and impressionable heart? Bosh

again! Or a beautiful soul? Dreimal bosh! No theologian

not in his cups would insure me against Hell for cent per

cent. No, the answer is to be found in the tune, not in the

man. Trivial in seeming, there is yet in it the power of a

thousand horses. Modest, it speaks with a clarion voice, and

having spoken, it is remembered. Brahms made manyanother like it. There is one at the beginning of the trio for

violin, 'cello and piano, opus 8 the loveliest tune, perhaps,

in the whole range of music. There is another in the slow

movement of the quintet for piano and strings, opus 34.

There is yet another in the double concerto for violin and

'cello, opus 102 the first subject of the slow movement.

There is one in the coda of the Third Symphony. There is

an exquisite one in the Fourth Symphony. But if you know

Brahms, you know all of them quite as well as I do. Hearinghim is as dangerous as hearing Schubert One does not go

away filled and satisfied, to resume business as usual in the

morning. One goes away charged with a something that

remains in the blood a long while, like the toxins of love or

the pneumococcus. If I had a heavy job of work to do on

the morrow, with all hands on deck and the cerebrum

Brahms 47

thrown into high, I'd certainly not risk hearing any of the

Schubert string quartets, or the incomparable quintet with

the extra 'cello, or the slow movement of the Tragic Sym-

phony. And Td hesitate a long time before risking Brahms.

It seems an astounding thing that there was once a war

over him, and that certain competent musicians, other-

wise sane, argued that he was dull. As well imagine a war

over Beauvais Cathedral or the Hundred-and-third Psalm.

The contention of these foolish fellows, if I recall it aright,

was that Brahms was dull in his development sections

that he flogged his tunes to death. I can think of nothing

more magnificently idiotic. Turn to the sextet that I have

mentioned, written in the early 6o's of the last century,

when the composer was barely thirty. The development

section of the first movement is not only fluent and work-

manlike: it is a downright masterpiece. There is a magnifi-

cent battle of moods in it, from the fiercest to the tenderest,

and it ends with a coda that is sheer perfection. True

enough, Brahms had to learn and it is in the handling of

thematic material, not in its invention, that learning counts.

When he wrote his first piano trio, at twenty-five or there-

about, he started oft as I have said, with one of the most

entrancing tunes ever put on paper, but when he came to

develop it his inexperience threw him, and the result was

such that years later he rewrote the whole work.

Butby the timehe came to his piano concerto inD he was

the complete master of his materials, and ever thereafter

he showed a quality of workmanship that no other com-

poser has ever surpassed, not even Beethoven. The first


movement of the Eroica, I grant you, is sui generis: it will

never be matched until the time two great geniuses collide

again. But what is in the rest of the first eight symphonies,

even including the Fifth and Ninth, that is clearly better

than what is in the four of Brahms? The first performance

of his First, indeed, was as memorable an event in the

history of music as the first performance of the Eroica.

Both were frantically denounced, and yet both were in-

stantaneous successes. I'd rather have been present at Karls-

ruhe on November 6, 1876, 1 think, than at the initiation of

General Pershing into the Elks. And I'd rather have been

present at Vienna on April 7, 1805, than at the landing of

Columbus.

More than any other art, perhaps, music demands brains.

It is full of technical complexities. It calls for a capacity to

do a dozen things at once. But most of all it is revelatory of

what is called character. When a trashy man writes it, it

is trashy music. Here is where the immense superiority of

such a man as Brahms becomes manifest. There is less

trashiness in his music than there is in the music of anyother man ever heard of, with the sole exception, perhaps,

of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was simply impossible for him,

at least after he had learned his trade, to be obvious or banal.

He could not write even the baldest tune without getting

into it something of his own high dignity and profound

seriousness; he could not play with that tune, however light

his mood, without putting an austere and noble stateliness

into it. Hearing Brahms, one never gets any sense of being

entertained by a clever mountebank. One is facing a supe-

Brahms 49

nor man, and the fact is evident from the first note. I give

you his "Deutsches Requiem" as an example. There is not

a hint of what is commonly regarded as religious feeling in

it. Brahms, so far as I know, was not a religious man. Nor

is there the slightest sign of the cheap fustian of conven-

tional patriotism. Nevertheless, a superb emotion is there

nay, an overwhelming emotion. The thing is irresistibly

moving. It is moving because a man of the highest intel-

lectual dignity, a man of exalted feelings, a man of brains,

put into it his love for and pride in his country.5

But in music emotion is only half the story. Mendelssohn

had it, and yet he belongs to the second table. Nor is it a

matter of mere beauty that is, of mere sensuous loveliness.

If it were, then Dvorak would be greater than Beethoven,

whose tunes are seldom inspired, and who not infrequently

does without them altogether. What makes great music

is simply the thing I have mentioned: brains. The greatest

musician is a man whose thoughts and feelings are above

the common level, and whose language matches them.

What he has to say comes out of a wisdom that is not ordi-

nary. Platitude is impossible to him. Above all, he is a mas-

ter of his craft, as opposed to his art. He gets his effects in

new, difficult and ingenious ways and they convince one

instantly that they are inevitable. One can easily imagine

improvements in the human eye, and in the Alps, and in

the art of love, and even in the Constitution, but one can-

not imagine improvement in the first movement of the

5 It is a "Deutches" (German) Requiem because the text is in

the German language instead of the traditional Latin.

5o H. L. Mencken ON Music

Eroica. The thing is completely perfect, even at the places

where the composer halts to draw breath. Any change in

it would damage it. But what is inevitable is never obvious.

John Doe would not and could not write thus. The im-

movable truths that are there and there are truths in the

arts as well as in theology became truths when Beethoven

formulated them. They did not exist before. They cannot

perish hereafter.

. . . End of Mencken on Brahms.

MORE

OF THE MASTERS

Schubert

(1797-1828)

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, November 19, 1928.

A HUNDRED years ago today, in Vienna, Franz Schubert

died. He was one of the greatest geniuses the world has

ever seen, but he was a poor man, and so his funeral was

very modest. At first his father, who was a schoolmaster,

planned to bury him under the floor of a parish church, but

someone suggested that a more suitable place would be

somewhere near Beethoven, who had died the year before.

So a grave was found in the Wahring cemetery, and there

he was planted, and still rests. His funeral cost 70 florins.

When, a week or so later, his estate was listed for the pub-

lic records, it was found to be 60 florins. Thus he died bank-

rupt

But it is not to be assumed from this that Schubert, in

life, had been unknown, or neglected. Far from it. His im-

mense talent was recognized when he was a boy of 15, and


by the time he was 25 he was already something of a celeb-

rity. The Viennese certainly had ears: they could hear his

music, and hearing it was enough to convince anyone that

it was good. But Schubert himself was the sort of man who,

in all societies and at all times, finds it hard to get along.

He was so modest that it was simply impossible for him to

push himself; he even shrank from meeting Beethoven, who

needed only a glance at his songs to see his genius. Worse,

he wrote so much that he constantly broke his own market.

There were always stacks of Schubert manuscripts in wait-

ing, and so the publishers paid very little for what they took.

This fecundity ran to almost incredible lengths. In fif-

teen years Schubert wrote more than 1,200 compositions,

some of them full-length symphonies. His songs run to at

least 600, and he wrote the astonishing number of 146 in a

single year, 1815. In the August of that year he wrote 29,

and on one day he wrote 8. It seems unbelievable, but it is

a fact. Some of these songs were better than others, but not

one of them was downright bad. The best are among the

imperishable glories of the human race. They are wholly

and overwhelmingly lovely. No one has ever written lovelier.

Schubert was poor, but he had what must have been, at

least in its externals, a pleasant life. A bachelor at large in

the most charming of cities, with a father and brothers

who appreciated him and plenty of amiable friends. He had

a daily round that was quite devoid of hardship. All morninghe would work at his desk, as steadily and busily as a book-

keeper. When he finished one composition he would start

another, sometimes on the same page. Most men, com-

Schubert 53

pleting so formidable a thing as a string quartette, are ex-

hausted, and have to resort to drink, travel, politics or re-

ligion for recuperation. But not Schubert. He simply began

an opera or a mass.

At i o'clock or thereabout he would knock off for the day

and go to dinner at a restaurant, usually the one called

"Zum Roten Kreuz" the Red Cross. It was a cheap place,

but the food was good and the beer was better. Like most

bachelors, Schubert never dined alone. There were always

agreeable companions, mainly young musicians like him-

self. They would remain at table for hours and then Schu-

bert would take a walk. In the evening he and his brothers

and their friends made music. They started with a little

family orchestra but it grew so large that the family home

could not contain it, and it moved to the larger house of an

acquaintance. It played almost every night. Schubert usually

played the viola, but sometimes he was the pianist.

This was his routine from October to June. In summer

he wandered about the Danubian countryside, usually with

a friend or two. They were always welcome, and had manymore invitations than they could accept They would go to

this or that country house, stay a week, and enchant the

family and other guests with their music. Schubert would

often write something for the occasion. It was thus that he

produced his superb setting to Shakespeare's "Who is Syl-

via?" It was thus that he wrote most of his German dances

waltzes and Ldndler. He composed a great many more of

these dances than he ever put on paper. He would sit at the

piano and they would flow from his fingers by the hour.


Those that survive are all very beautiful. Schubert thus

had little need for money, and hence made an easy mark

for the music publishers. He sold some of his songs to them

for as little as 20 cents. Now and then, pulling himself to-

gether, he resolved to make a stake, and usually, on such

occasions, he wrote an opera. But his operas were always

failures, and most of them never got to the stage. A suc-

cessful opera composer is half musician and half down;

sometimes the clown part of him is two-thirds, or even nine-

tenths. Schubert had no talent in tfiat direction. He was

an artist, not a showman.

Much of his best music he never heard played, save by

the family orchestra. This was true even of his Unfinished

Symphony, one of the noblest works in the whole range of

music. He wrote the two movements that we have six years

before his death, but then abandoned it, and it did not be-

come generally known until long afterward. His great

C Major fared even more badly. In 1844 the London Phil-

harmonic put it into rehearsal, but the members of the or-

chestra, for some unknown reason, laughed at it, and it was

shelved until 1856. After Schubert's death so many of his

unpublished songs began to appear that many persons sus-

pected his brother Ferdinand of forging them.

But Schubert, in life, wasted little time worrying about

the fate of his music. He wrote it, not to entertain concert

audiences, but to please himself, and out of that fact

flowed a great deal of its magnificent merit. It is, in large

part, so familiar to the musicians of today that they often

overlook its astounding orginality. Not infrequently one

Schubert 55

finds anticipations in it even of Wagner! but it is al-

most wholly bare of reminiscence. Schubert's harmonies

were unlike the harmonies of any composer who had gone

before him. They were not only different; they were better.

His melodies differed enormously from those of his fore-

runners. He did not look back to Mozart and Haydn: he

looked forward to Brahms. Maybe Beethoven influenced

him. There are, indeed, indications that way in the Tragic

Symphony, written in 1816, and especially in the slow

movement. But Beethoven would have been proud of that

slow movement if he had written it himself and it re-

mains, in the kst analysis, pure Schubert. No one else,

before or since, could have done it.

As I have said, Schubert led a placid and care-free life.

Now and then he was on short commons, and had to double

up in lodgings with a friend or two, but that was no hard-

ship for a young bachelor. He knew a great many pleasant

people, male and female, and they admired him and made

much of him. The gals were not unappreciative of him,

though he was surely no beauty. He loved good wine and

got down many a carboy of it in his time. Vienna was gay

and charming, even when there was war and the war was

over before he was nineteen.

Nevertheless, such stray confidences as we have from

him indicates that he was given to melancholy and often

fell into cruel depressions. His music, he once wrote in a

diary, came out of the depth of his sorrow. The fact is writ-

ten all over it. It is very seldom merry. Schubert wrote some

of the most dark and somber music ever written for ex-


ample the "Winterreise" cycle, the last movement of the

Unfinished, the slow movement of the Tragic, the first

movement of the quintette with the two 'cellos, and such

songs as the familiar Serenade. Even his scherzi tend to

be gloomy, as witness the two in the octette.

Love? Heartache? A haughty wench? Hardly. Schubert's

contemporaries heard of nothing of the sort. To them he

was simply Schwammerl, a care-free and charming fellow,

handy with the girls and a capital companion at the Bier-

tisch. They forgot, seeing him every day, that he was also

an artist one of the greatest, indeed, ever known in the

world. They forgot that an artist forges his work out of

inner substance by a process almost cannibalistic that the

price of beauty is heavy striving and cruel pain that all

artists, at bottom, are forlorn and melancholy men. Theyhad Beethoven before them, wracked and consumed by his

own vapors, but they were too close to Schubert to see into

him.

Thus artists pay for what they give us. Schubert got off

easily. He was dead at 32, and behind him trailed a series

of almost incomparable masterpieces. His genius was of

the first caliber. Dead a hundred years, he remains as alive

as the child born yesterday. Out of his dark moods came

treasures that belong to all of us. He increased the stature

and dignity of man. He was one of the truly great men.

Schubert 57

Schubert

From the American Mercury, November, 1928, pp. 284-6.


FRANZ SCHUBERT, at least in Anglo-Saxondom, has evaded

the indignity of too much popularity. Even his lovely "Sere-

nade/' perhaps the most moving love-song ever written, has

escaped being mauled at weddings in the manner of Men-

delssohn's march from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

and Wagner's from "Lohengrin." It is familiar, but not

thread-bare; I have listened to it within the past week with

new delight in its noble and poignant melody, its rhythmic

and harmonic ingenuity, its indescribable Schubertian fla-

vor. Nor is there anything stale about nine-tenths of his

piano music, or the songs. The former is played very little

far, far too little. The latter are yowled in all the music

studios of the world, but the populace remains unaware of

them, and so they manage to hold their dignity and charm.

'The Erl King" and "Who is Sylvia?" have become familiar

on the air, but surely not many of the remaining six hun-

dred.

Schubert, indeed, was far too fine an artist to write for

the mob. When he tried to do it in the theater he failed

miserably, and more than once he even failed in the con-

cert-hall. There is the case, for example, of "Heidenroslein",

to Goethe's words. Goethe wrote them in 1773 and

J. F. Reichardt set them in 1793. In 1815, a year after

Reichardt's death, Schubert made a new setting. Was it

better that is, considering the homely words? No; it was


harder to sing, but not better. Twleve years later the text

was reset again by Heinrich Werner, a composer so obscure

that even Grove's Dictionary is silent about him, but a man,

obviously, with all the gift for simple, transparent melody

of a Friedrich Silcher. When "Heidenroslein" is sung today

it is to Werner's melody, not Schubert's.

Great stretches of Schubert's music, indeed, remain al-

most unknown, even to musicians. Perhaps a hundred of

his songs are heard regularly in the concert-hall; the rest

get upon programmes only rarely. Of his chamber music

little is heard at all, not even the two superb piano trios,

the octet, and the quintet with the two 'cellos. Of his sym-

phonies the orchestras play the Unfinished incessantly

but never too often! and the huge C Major now and then,

but the Tragic only once in a blue moon. Yet the Tragic

remains one of Schubert's masterworks, and in its slow

movement, at least, it rises to the full height of the Un-

finished. There are not six such slow movements in the

whole range of music. It has an eloquence that has never

been surpassed, not even by Beethoven, but there is no

rhetoric in it, no heroics, no exhibitionism. It begins quietly

and simply and it passes out in a whisper, but its beauty

remains overwhelming. I defy anyone with ears to listen

to it without being moved profoundly, as by the spectacle

of great grief.

We know little directly about what Schubert thought of

his compositions. He was, for a musician, strangely re-

served. But indirectly there is the legend that, in his last

days, he thought of taking lessons in counterpoint from

Schubert 59

Simon Sechter. The story has always appealed pleasantly

to the musical biographers; mainly ninth-rate men, they

delight in discovering imbecilities in artists. My guess is

that Schubert, if he actually proposed to seek the den of

Sechter, did it in a sportive spirit. Going to school to a ped-

ant would have appealed charmingly to his sardonic humor.

What Sechter had to teach him was precisely what a Hugh

Walpole might have taught Joseph Conrad, no less and no

more.

It is astonishing how voluptuously criticism cherishes

nonsense. This notion that Schubert lacked skill at counter-

point seems destined to go on afflicting his fame forever,

despite the plain evidence to the contrary in his most famil-

iar works. How can anyone believe it who has so much as

glanced at the score of the Unfinished? That score is quite

as remarkable for its adroit and lovely combinations of melo-

dies as it is for its magnificent modulations. It is seldom

that one is heard alone. They come in two by two, and they

are woven into a fabric that is at once simple and compli-

cated, and always beautiful. Here is contrapuntal writing

at its very best, for the means are concealed by a perfect

effect. Here is the complete antithesis of the sort of counter-

point that is taught by the Sechters.

No doubt the superstition that Schubert had no skill at

polyphony gets some support from the plain fact that he

seldom wrote a formal fugue. There is one at the end of his

cantata, "Miriam's Siegesgesang", and in his last year he

wrote another for piano duet. The strict form however, was

out of accord with the natural bent of his invention; he did


not think of terse, epigrammatic subjects, as Bach did and

Beethoven afterward; he thought of complete melodies, the

most ravishing ever heard in this world. It would be hard to

imagine his making anything of the four austere notes

which Beethoven turned into the first movement of the Cminor symphony. He would have gone on to develop them

melodically before ever he set himself to manipulating them

contrapuntally. But that was not a sign of his inferiority to

Beethoven; it was, in its way, a sign of his superiority. Hewas infinitely below old Ludwig as a technician; he lacked

the sheer brain-power that went into such masterpieces as

the first movement of the Eroica and the allegretto of the

Seventh. Such dizzy feats of pure craftsmanship were be-

yond him. But where he fell short as an artisan he was un-

surpassed as an artist. He invented more beautiful musical

ideas in his thirty-one years than even Mozart or Haydn,and he proclaimed them with an instinctive skill that was

certainly not inferior to any mere virtuosity, however daz-

zling and however profound.This instinctive skill is visible quite as clearly in his coun-

terpoint as it is in his harmony. Throwing off the pedantic

fetters that bound even Bach, he got into polyphony all the

ease and naturalness of simple melody. His subjects and

counter-subjects are never tortured to meet the rules; theyflow on with a grace like that of wheat rippled by the wind.

The defect of prettiness is not in them. They show, at their

most trivial, all the fine dignity of Schubert the man. Beau-

tiful always in their simple statement, they take on fresh

and even more enchanting beauties when one supports

Schubert 61

another. There are passages in the Unfinished, especially

in the first movement, that are almost unparalleled in music,

and there are passages equally fine in compositions that are

seldom heard, notably the aforesaid quintet. When Schu-

bert died the art of writing so magnificently seemed to pass

out of the world. It was not until the colossal figure of

Brahms arose that it found another master.

He was, to music, its great heart, as Beethoven was its

great mind. All the rest begin to seem a bit archaic, but he

continues to be a contemporary. He was essentially a mod-

ern, though he was born in the Eighteenth Century. In his

earliest compositions there was something far beyond the

naive idiom of Mozart and Haydn. Already in 'The Erl

King" there was an echo of Beethoven's fury; later on it

was to be transformed into a quieter mood, but one none

the less austere. The man lived his inner life upon a high

level. Outwardly a simple and unpretentious fellow, and

condemned by poverty to an uneventful routine, he yet

walked with the gods. His contacts with the world brought

him only defeat and dismay. He failed at all the enterprises

whereby the musicians of his day got fame and money. But

out of every failure there flowed a masterpiece.

In all the history of music there has never been another

man of such stupendous natural talents. It would be diffi-

cult, indeed, to match him in any of the other fine arts. He

was the artist par excellence, moved by a powerful instinct

to create beauty, and equipped by a prodigal nature with the

precise and perfect tools. The gabble about his defective

training probably comes down to us from his innocent


friends and fellows in Vienna. They never estimated him

at his true stature, but they at least saw that there was

something extraordinary and even miraculous about him

that what he did could not be accounted for logically, but

lay far beyond the common bounds of cause and effect Weknow next to nothing about his mental processes. He was

surrounded by inferiorities who noted with wonder how

savagely he worked, how many hours a day he put in at

his writing-table, and what wonders he achieved, but were

too dull to be interested in what went on inside his head.

Schubert himself was silent on that subject. From him there

issued not even the fragmentary revelations that came from

Mozart. All we know is that his ideas flowed like a cataract

that he knew nothing of Beethoven's tortured wooing of

beauty that his first thoughts, more often than not, were

complete, perfect and incomparable.

No composer of the first rank has failed to surpass him

in this way or that, but he stands above all of them as a

contriver of sheer beauty, as a maker of music in the purest

sense. There is no more smell of the lamp in his work than

there is in the lyrics of Shakespeare. It is infinitely artless

and spontaneous. But in its arflessness there is no sign of

that intellectual poverty which so often shows itself, for

example, in Haydn. Few composers, not even Beethoven

and Bach, have been so seldom banal. He can be repetitious

and even tedious, but it seems a sheer impossibility for him

to be obvious or hollow. Such defects get into works of art

when the composer's lust to create is unaccompanied by a

sufficiency of sound and charming ideas. But Schubert

Wagner (Symbiosis and the Artist) 63

never lacked ideas. Within the limits of his interests and

curiosities he hatched more good ideas in his thirty-one

years than all the rest of mankind has hatched since the

beginning of time.

Music is kind to its disciples. When they bring high tal-

ents to its service they are not forgotten. They survive

among the durably salient men, the really great men, the

remembered men. Schubert belongs in that rare and envi-

able company. Life used him harshly, but time has made

up for it. He is one of the great glories of the human race.

Wagner

(1813-83)

SYMBIOSIS AND THE ARTIST

From Toward a Realistic Esthetic, PREJUDICES: FOURTH

SERIES, 1924, pp. 249-51.

First printed in tihe Smart Set, July, 1922, pp. 41-3.


IN CONTEMPLATING the stupendous achievements of Wag-ner one finds one's self wondering how much further he

would have gone had he not been harassed by his two

dreadful wives. The first, Minna Planer, was implacably

opposed to his life-work, and made hard efforts to dissuade

him from it. She regarded "Lohengrin" as nonsensical and

'Tannhauser" as downright indecent. It was her constant


hope, until Wagner finally kicked her out, that he would

give over such stuff, and consecrate himself to the compo-

sition of respectable operas in the manner of Rossini. She

was a singer, and had the brains of one. It must be plain

that the presence of such a woman and Wagner lived

with her for twenty years must have put a fearful burden

upon his creative genius. No man can be absolutely indif-

ferent to the opinions and prejudices of his wife. She has

too many opportunities to shove them down his throat. If

she can't make him listen to them by howling and bawling,

she can make him listen by snuffling. To say that he can

carry on his work without paying any heed to her is equal

to saying that he can carry on his work without paying any

heed to his toothache, his conscience, or the zoo next door.

In spite of Minna, Wagner composed a number of very fine

music dramas. But if he had poisoned her at the beginning

of his career it is very likely that he could have composedmore of them, and perhaps better ones.

His second wife, the celebrated Cosima Liszt-von Bulow,

had far more intelligence than Minna, and so we may as-

sume that her presence in his music factory was less of a

handicap upon the composer. Nevertheless, the chances are

that she, too, did him far more harm than good. To begin

with, she was extremely plain in face and nothing is more

damaging to the creative faculty than the constant presence

of ugliness. Cosima, in fact, looked not unlike a modern

woman politician; even Nietzsche, a very romantic young

fellow, had to go crazy before he could fall in love with her.

In the second place, there is good reason to believe that

Wagner (Symbiosis and the Artist] 65

Cosima, until Wagner's death, secretly believed that her

father, Papa Liszt, was a far better musician. Men's wives

almost invariably make some such mistake; to find one who

can separate the man of genius from the mere husband,

and then estimate the former accurately and fairly, is surely

very rare. A woman usually respects her father, but her view

of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of

course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared

him. It is difficult for her, being so acutely aware of the

weakness of the man, to give due weight to the dignity of

the artist. Moreover, Cosima had shoddy tastes, and they

played destructively upon poor Wagner. There are parts of

"Parsifal" that suggest her very strongly far more strongly,

in fact, than they suggest the author of "Die Meistersinger."

I do not here decry Wagner; on the contrary, I praise him,

and perhaps excessively. It is staggering to think of the

work he did, with Minna and Cosima shrilling in his ears.

What interests me is the question as to how much further

he might have gone had he escaped the passionate affection

of the two of them and of their various volunteer assistants.

The thought fascinates, and almost alarms. There is a limit

beyond which sheer beauty becomes unseemly. In 'Tristan

und Isolde", in the "Ring", and even in parts of "Parsifal",

Wagner pushes his music very near that limit. A bit beyond

lies the fourth dimension of tone and madness.


Wagner

THE ETERNAL FARCE

From Reflections on Human Monogamy,

PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 107-8.

First printed in the Smart Set, March, 1922, p. 44.


EVEN NIETZSCHE was deceived by Wagner's "Parsifal."

Like the most maudlin German fat woman at Bayreuth,

he mistook the composer's elaborate and outrageous bur*

lesque of Christianity for a tribute to Christianity, and so

denounced him as a jackass and refused to speak to him

thereafter. To this day 'TarsifaT is given with all the trap-

pings of a religious ceremonial, and pious folks go to hear

it who would instantly shut their ears if the band began

playing "Tristan und Isolde." It has become, in fact, a sort

of "Way Down East" or "Ben-Hur" of music drama a

bait for luring patrons who are never seen in the opera house

otherwise. But try to imagine such a thumping atheist as

Wagner writing a religious opera seriously! And if, by any

chance, you succeed in imagining it, then turn to the Char-

Freitag music, and play it on your phonograph. Here is the

central scene of the piece, the moment of most austere

solemnity and to it Wagner fits music that is so luscious

and so fleshy indeed, so downright lascivious and inde-

cent that even I, who am almost anesthetic to such provo-

cations, blush every time I hear it. The Flower Maidens

do not raise my blood-pressure a single ohm; I have actually

drowsed through the whole second act of 'Tristan/' But


when I hear that Char-Freitag music all my Freudian sup-

pressions begin groaning and stretching their legs in the

dungeons of my unconscious. And what does Char-Freitag

mean? Char-Freitag means Good Friday!

Franz Joseph Haydn

(1732-1809)


(The following article [Franz Joseph Haydn] is one of a number

written by Mencken to encourage interest in the newly created

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It was the first instance in this

country that an orchestra was entirely subsidized by the city gov-

ernment. Dr. Gustav Strube, assistant conductor of the Boston

Symphony Orchestra, was brought to Baltimore

to be its conductor.)

NEVER HAVING HEARD the Haydn symphony which Dr.

Strube and his tone artists are to perform on Friday night,

I am unable to tell you precisely what is in it, but all the

same I offer my ears in wager that good stuff is there, and

that no one will hear it without joy. Old Haydn wrote so

many symphonies that no one in the world has heard them

all, but he never wrote one that lacked beauty, and he never

wrote one that was not marked all over by his extraordi-

narily cheerful and ingratiating personality. Exploring

them is an almost endless business and full of charming

surprises. Some time ago, idling away a half hour at Schir-

mer's I happened upon one so crowded with loveliness that


its relative obscurity remains astounding. A composition of

such unusual beauties written today, would make a com-

poser's reputation. But Haydn wrote dozens, nay scores,

like it: and many of them are now moldering on the shelf

and forgotten by all save compilers of thematic catalogues.

Beethoven stopped with nine symphonies; Mozart with

forty;* Schumann and Brahms with four each; Schubert

with eight; Tschaikowsky with six; Mendelssohn with five;

Mahler with eight or nine. But Haydn wrote fully a hun-

dred, not counting symphonic overtures, and among them

all it is difficult to find a dull one, or one which does not

show superb musicianship on every page.

The very clarity and simplicity of these great works has

mitigated against a true understanding of their merit. Too

often they are dismissed as hollow, as trivial, almost as in-

fantile. In the shadow of the vast compositions of Bee-

thoven they shrink to almost nothing. But a diligent study

of them is all that is needed to rehabilitate them. Under

the smooth and glistening surface there is seen a structure

of the utmost complexity and ingenuity. They are magnifi-

cently articulated and thought out. They stand as unsur-

passable examples of that exact and inevitable form which

is the soul of all great music. There are ideas in them; the

flow of beautiful sound never ceases for an instant; they

have a beginning, a middle and an end; they hang together

almost perfectly. One turns to them, from harmonic and

emotional bombastics of modern orchestral music. . . .

But Haydn was more than a great composer of music;1Actually, Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, Haydn 104.


he was, beyond everything else, a great musical revolu-

tionary. The orchestra as we know it today is his creation,

or, at any rate, more his than any other man's. He put

form and logic into the symphony, the most formal and

logical of musical forms. He improved and gave direction

to the solo sonata. Above all, he left the marks of his genius

upon the string quartet. His principal quartets, even after

all these years, remain fresh and vigorous; they still dispute

for places on programs with the quartets of Beethoven and

the vastly more complex quartets of a later day. In them,

and for the first time, one finds that varied and resourceful

four-part writing which is the secret of all the charm of the

form, and that adroit use of polyphony which alone makes

it possible. And in them, too, despite many a naif touch,

one finds a sound understanding of the capabilities and

limitations of the four instruments, and an amazing skill

at developing their beauties. The famous Kaiser quartet,

as it stands, is so nearly perfect that the search for flaws

in it can only lead to absurdity. Beethoven, true enough,

wrote greater quartets, but he surely never wrote a greater

one within those limits.

As for the symphonies, they are little heard today, not

so much because they are empty of the wild emotion that

music-lovers have been taught to look for, as because they

are infernally difficult of execution. Their very simplicity,

in fact, is what makes them hard to play properly; the

slightest error in tone or dynamics sticks out like a sore

thumb. Modern music, by its'bewildering complexity, gives

tone artists hedges to hide behind. Once in Munich, hearing

yo H. L. Mencken ON Music

'TSlectra" from the front row of the orchestra, I observed

several of the first violins lose their places. A kindly brother

in art hauled them up by stabbing them in the ribs with

his fiddle bow. But though they had been playing fortis-

simo, it made not the slightest difference to the audience,

and even the conductor was unaware of their mishap. Amusician lately told me* of a similar proceeding, deliberate

this time, in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During the

performance of a celebrated tone-poem, much disliked by

the men, a group of the first violins invariably played

"Fuchs, du hast die Cans Gestolen", or some other such

sweet lullaby. But the audience never noticed it, and neither

did Dr. Fiedler, the estimable kapellmeister . . . imagine

that sort of thing in Haydn! The very ushers would

screaml3

Haydn was born in 1732 at Rohrau, a small town in

Austria, near the border of Hungary. His father was the

village blacksmith, and also practiced the science of a

church sexton; his mother had been third cook in the house-

hold of Graf Harrach, a local magnifico. Mamma Haydnhad 12 little Haydns, and after her death her successor

had 5 more. Joseph was the second of the 17. At the age of

6 he was humanely rescued from this happy home by an

uncle from the nearby town of Hainsburg, one Johann

a These are not exaggerations. The concert-master of the Balti-

more Symphony Orchestra, beside whom I played as assistant,

frequently improvised variations on "Dixie" during rehearsals andeven performances of contemporary compositions for which he did

not care, unnoticed under the very nose of one of our later con-

ductors.


Matthias Fiankh, a schoolmaster. Uncle Johann taught him

the violin and harpsichord and discovered that he had a

voice. One day this voice was heard by George Reutter,

the court kapellmeister at Vienna, and in 1740 little Joseph

was translated to the capital, where he was soon piping a

shrill soprano in the choir of Old Steffel, the Vienna ca-

thedral, and taking lessons from two professors named

Gegenbauer and Finsterbusch. Of Gegenbauer and Finster-

busch nothing more is known; they fade from the chronicle

like Rosenkranz and Guildenstern.

Joseph, his voice having broken, was kicked out of the

choir in 1749, and for two or three years thereafter he led

a very lonely and miserable life, and came near starving.

Only one person seems to have genuinely befriended him,

a storekeeper named Buchholz. This Buchholz, on no se-

curity save his belief in the boy's genius, lent him 150

florins a very large sum for those days. Years afterward,

in his will, Haydn left the daughter of Buchholz 100 florins

in memory of her father's generosity. Buchholz himself had

been repaid 50 years before and was long since dead. Haydn

never forgot such kindnesses. His will, indeed, mentioned

everyone who had been kind to him during his long life,

including especially Johann Frankh, and he left substantial

bequests to the children of all of them. Fully 50 persons

were mentioned by name in this testament, ranging from

the son of that Graf von Harrach forwhom Haydn's mother

had worked as a cook, to the composer's old body-servant

Johann Elssler, to whom he left money enough to keep

him at ease for the rest of his days.


It was Metastasio the poet who first set Haydn on his

legs. How they met is not known, but Metastasio got him

a pupil in Senorita Marianne von Martinez, a daughter to

the Master of Ceremonies to the Papal Nuncio, and this

connection brought him to the notice of various influential

persons, and after engagements as orchestral conductor

with Baron von Fiirnberg, Countess von Thun, Count

Hagwitz, Count Morzin and other members of the nobility,

he began that long engagement with the Esterhazys which

was to make his reputation and his fortune, and to color the

whole stream of his life. The Prince Esterhazy of that time

was Paul Anton, and like all his relatives he was an ardent

musician. The family castle at Eisenstadt, in the Hun-

garian mountains, had always had a private orchestra: be-

fore the end of Haydn's 30 years of service this orchestra

was to be increased to 45 men, and to become an organi-

zation of the highest consequence. The Esterhazys had

plenty of money to pay for such luxuries. Among them they

possessed 29 titles of nobility, and owned 21 castles, 60

market towns and 414 villages in Hungary alone, not to

mention vast estates in Lower Austria and a whole countyin Bavaria. At Eisenstadt, though it was remote and lonely,

Haydn was very happy, for he had a patron who was eager

to help him and he had an orchestra for all his experiments.

Here, and later at Esterhaz, he learned to write music by

writing it; here he tried out the plans that were to revolu-

tionize music; here he composed most of his immortal

works.

Much has been made of Haydn's so-called servile position


at Eisenstadt and Esterhaz. It is commonly believed, in-

deed, that his rank was that of a servant, and that he was

compelled to eat in the kitchen. Pious articles without num-

ber have been written upon his woes, upon the insults he

suffered, upon his humility under them. Much poppycock is

here covered with moralizing sugar. The truth is that Haydnwas anything but a shrinking and humble fellow. He was

a great artist and he knew it, and you may be sure that he

exacted the politeness due his character, even from so

powerful a family of magnates as the Esterhazys. Moreover,

the text of his contract with Prince Paul Anton, published

in J.Cuthbert Haddon's life, shows plainly that he was not

ranked as a servant at all, but that it was provided that he

should be "considered and treated as a member of the house-

hold", that he should be considered an "Official", and that

he should mess with the officers of the Prince's staff. In

brief, his footing was exactly that of the minor nobles who

surrounded the great and powerful Prince, and what is

more, he got a good salary for those times. Toward the end

of his service he received 1400 florins a year, his board and

lodging, and a liberal allowance for clothes and traveling

expenses. This, in the money of today, was equal to the

pay and allowances of a lieutenant in the navy.

Prince Paul Anton died a year after Haydn got to Eisen-

stadt and was succeeded by his brother Nicolaus, a gaudy

and Gargantuan personage. Nicolaus was the Diamond

Jim Brady of his time. He spent his immense revenues upon

gigantic fetes and shows, and wore uniforms heavily en-

crusted with precious stones. His notion of a good time


was to go boar-hunting with a hundred companions, and

then feast and carouse for two weeks. Nevertheless the fam-

ily love of music was in him, and he seems to have treated

Haydn with great respect. Not content with having music

made for him, he essayed to make it himself, and so spent

his rainy days practicing on the violoncello and the bary-

tone, a somewhat smaller instrument of the same tribe, now

happily extinct. Haydn wrote no fewer than 175 compo-

sitions for the barytone, including three concertos, and

Nicolaus played them all. On this instrument, perhaps, the

Prince was a competent performer, but he seems to have had

difficulties with the 'cello, for in all of Haydn's trios the parts

for it are very simple, and there is a legend that he made

them so in order to please his patron. These trios suffer from

the fact to this day, for 'cellists dislike them, and so their

great beauties are seldom heard. Haydn himself played

either the violin or the clavier parts: both are difficult and

intensely interesting.

As I have said, Haydn remained with the Esterhazys, off

and on for 30 years. Then he went to England as Handel

had done before him. He was received with the highest re-

spect when he got there, and became, indeed, the chief lion

of London, but it took a lot of arguing to induce him to go.

On the one hand, he was getting old and greatly disliked

travel; on the other hand, he had many ties in Vienna. Onehears of him struggling painfully with the English language,

and longing sadly for the flesh-pots of Wien. The English

victualry did not please him; he would awake in the night

weeping for a basin of German Linsensuppe and a slab of


the excellent coffee cake of his old friend Frau von Gen-

ziger. Worse, a widow of London, Mrs. Schroeter, tried to

ensnare him, despite the fact that he was married. (He had

been separated from his wife, a barber's daughter for 23

years.) All in all he longed to escape, and in 1792 he re-

turned home. But two years later he was lured back and re-

mained until the summer of 1795. Despite his discomforts,

he wrote some of his best music in England, including half

a dozen symphonies.8

Back in Austria once more, he devoted himself whole-

heartedly to composition, and among the fruits of his last

years were "The Creation", 'The Seasons" and the Aus-

trian national anthem, now universally known as "Deutsch-

land fiber Alles." The last named is, by all odds, the most

beautiful of all national anthems, and the most respectable

as music. Haydn wrote it to order. Austria, at that time, had

no national hymn, and the Imperial Chancellor, Graf von

Saurau, engaged the poet Ilaschka to write one. (The origi-

nal words, "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" are still used by

the Austrians.) Haydn was then invited to provide music for

it, and one of his characteristic inspirations gave him the

lovely melody now so familiar. When the hymn was first

sung on February 12, 1797, it made a colossal success, and

Haydn became a national idol.

The composer himself ranked his hymn above all his

other compositions. When the French bombarded Vienna

in 1809 he seated himself at his piano every morning and

3Actually Haydn composed twelve symphonies in London

probably his very best six in 1791 and another six in 1794.

j6 H. L. Mencken ON Music

played the melody amid the booming of the guns. In Mayof that year, only five days before his death, he arose from

his bed and played it three times in succession. The air had

acquired a lofty sacredness in his eyes. He was a firm patriot

and its adoption by his people had moved him profoundly.

Johann Strauss

(1825-99)

From the Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1925.

Also from Five Little Excursions,

PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES, 1927, pp. 169-74.


THE CENTENARY of Johann Strauss the Younger in 1925

passed almost unnoticed in the United States. In Berlin and

in Vienna it was celebrated with imposing ceremonies, and

all the German radio stations put "Wein, Weib und Ge-

sang" and "Rosen aus dem Siiden" on the air. Why wasn't

it done in this great country? Was the curse of jazz to blame

or was it due to the current pestilence of Prohibition and

the consequent scarcity of sound beer? I incline to Answer

No. 2. Any music is difficult on well-water, but the waltz is

a sheer impossibility. "Man Lebt Nur Einmal" is as dread-

ful in a dry country as a Sousa march at a hanging.

For the essence of a Viennese waltz, and especially of a

Strauss waltz, is merriment, good humor, happiness. Sad

music, to be sure, has been written in Vienna but chiefly

PLATE V Mencken (on theleft] singing vrifli a quartet from

the press-room and composing-room to the children ofm corre-

spondents at a Christmasparty,

Sun office, December 22, 1944

Johann Strauss 77

by foreigners: Haydn, who was a Croat; Beethoven, whose

pap had been a sour Rhine wine; Brahms, who came from

the bleak Baltic coast. I came upon Schubert but all the

rules go to pot when he appears. As for Strauss, he was

100% Viennese, and could no more be sad than he could

be indignant. The waltz wandered into the minor keys in

Paris, in the hands of the sardonic Alsatian Jew, Waldteufel,

but at home old Johann kept it in golden major, and so did

young Johann after him. The two, taking it from Schubert

and the folk, lifted it to imperial splendor. No other dance-

form, not even the minuet, has ever brought forth more

lovely music. And none other has preserved so perfectly the

divine beeriness of the peasant dance. The best of the

Strauss waltzes were written for the most stilted and cere-

monious court in Europe, but in every one of them, great

and little, there remains the boggy, expansive flavor of the

village green. Even the stately "Kaiser" waltz, with its pre-

liminary heelclicks and saber-rattling, is soon swinging

jocosely to the measures of the rustic Springtanz.

It is a curious, melancholy and gruesome fact that Jo-

hann Strauss II was brought up to the variety of delinquency

known as investment banking. His father planned that he

should be what in our time is called a bond salesman. What

asses fathers are. This one was himself a great master of the

waltz, and yet he believed that he could save all three of his

sons from its lascivious allurement. Young Johann was dedi-

cated to investment banking, Josef to architecture, and

Eduard, the baby, to the law. The old man died on Septem-

ber 25, 1849. On September 26 all three were writing


waltzes. Johann, it quickly appeared, was the best of the

trio. In fact, he was the best musician who ever wrote

waltzes for dancing, and one of the salient composers of all

time. He took the waltz as his father left it, and gradually

built it up into a form almost symphonic. He developed the

introduction, which had been little more than an opening

fanfare, into a complex and beautiful thing, almost an over-

ture, and he elaborated the coda until it began to demand

every resource of the composer's art, including even coun-

terpoint. And into the waltz itself he threw such melodic

riches, so vastly a rhythmic inventiveness and so adept a

mastery of instrumentation that the effect was overwhelm-

ing. The Strauss waltzes, it seems to me, have never been

sufficiently studied. Consider, for example, the astonishing

skill with which Johann manages his procession of keys

the inevitable air which he always gets into his choice. And

the immense ingenuity with which he puts variety into his

bass so monotonous in Waldteufd, and even in Lanner

and Gung'L And the endless resourcefulness which marks

his orchestration never formal and obvious for an instant,

but always with some new quirk in it, some fresh and

charming beauty. And his codas how simple they are, and

yet how ravishing. Johann certainly did not blush unseen.

He was an important figure at the Austrian court, and when

he passed necks were craned as if at an ambassador. Hetraveled widely and was received with honor everywhere.

His waltzes swept the world. His operettas, following

them, offered formidable rivalry to the pieces of Gilbert and

Johann Strauss 79

Sullivan. He was plastered with orders. He took in, in his

time, a great deal of money, and left all his wives well pro-

vided for. More, he had the respect and a little of the envy

of all his musical contemporaries. Wagner delighted in his

waltzes and so did Brahms. Once one of the Strauss wives,

encountering Brahms at the annual ball of the Third As-

sembly District Democratic Association of Vienna, asked

him to sign her fan. He wrote upon it the opening theme of

"The Beautiful Blue Danube" and added "Leider nicht von

Johannes Brahms" Unfortunately, not by Johannes

Brahms. It was a compliment indeed perhaps the most

tremendous recorded in history nor was there any mere

politeness in it, for Brahms had written plenty of waltzes

himself, and knew it was not as easy as it looked.

The lesser fish followed the whales. There was never any

clash of debate over Strauss. It was unanimously agreed that

he was first-rate. His field was not wide, but within that

field he was unchallenged. He became, in the end, the dean

of a sort of college of waltz writers, centering in Vienna.

The waltz, as he had brought it up to perfection, became

the standard ball-room dance of the civilized world, and

though it had to meet rivals constantly, it held its own for

two generations, and even now, despite the murrain of jazz,

it comes back once more. Disciples of great skill began to

appear in the Straussian wake Ziehrer with the beautiful

"Weaner MadT', Komchak with "Fidelis Wien", Lincke

with "Ach, Friihling, Wie Bist Du So Schon", and many

another. But the old Johann never lost his primacy. Down


to the very day of his death in 1899 he was primus inter

omnes. Vienna wept oceans of beery tears into his grave. A

great Viennese perhaps the ultimate flower of old Vienna

was gone.

Schumann

( 1810-56)

O, Fruehttng, Wie Bist Du So Schoen!

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 13, 1916.

ROBERT SCHUMANN'S Symphony No. i, in B flat, which

Mr. Strube and his band are to play on Friday night, con-

tains more of pure joy, it is likely, than any other symphonic

work in the classical repertoire, saving only Beethoven's

No. 8. And no wonder! It was written under conditions that

would have inflamed even a prohibitionist to happiness.

Schumann was young, he had just made his first big suc-

cesses, such men as Liszt and Moscheles were beginning to

notice him, he was well-to-do and in good health, he was

making his first serious venture in the enticing field of the

grand orchestra, it was a glorious German Springtime

and he was in the midst of his honeymoon with his lovely

and talented wife, the inspiration of all that was best in him

and the idol of his heart to the end of his days. Picture the

scene, the situation. And then go to hear the symphony!

Schumann was married to Clara Wieck on September 12,

Schumann 81

1840, exactly 40 years to a day, by the way, before Christen-

dom was adorned by4

but let it pass! He began work on

the symphony in February, 1841, and on a day, as we learn

from a letter to Karl Taubert, when the first breath of spring

was in the air. It was his original intention to call it "A

Spring Symphony", and the first and last movements, in

manuscript, were labeled "Spring's Awakening" and

"Spring's Farewell", respectively; but when the time came

to publish it he decided to let it go out without any program.In truth, it needs none. No one with the slightest imagi-

nation can hear it without sensing its significance. From the

opening blare of the trumpets and French horns to the final

chords for full orchestra, the triumphant gayety of Spring-

time is in it. It is full of arch and tickling passages. Its

melodies are sparkling, and chase one another in and out.

Schumann kicks up his legs, and takes deep breaths of the

vernal air, and praises God with happy tunes. As I have said,

the work was the fruit of the composer's first serious effort

to write for grand orchestra. He had attempted a symphony,

t9ffitt|0ugh,in 1830, but he was then only 20 years old

ancWPvas so bad that it remained unpublished, and is still,

in fact in manuscript. His symphony in B flat was thus his

initial essay in writing for the whole band, and naturally

enough he did not master the difficult technique of that

enterprise at one stroke. When the work was first played the

opening measures, being ineptly scored for the horns,

sounded so badly that the audience laughed, and Schumann

at once raised the whole passage a third, in which, form it

4Henry Mencken was born on September 12, 1880.


appears now. There were other rough spots in the original

score, and the composer changed some of them when the

symphony was done in Leipzig. These blemishes, no doubt,

set going the notion still held by many critics, that Schu-

mann was a bad writer for the orchestra. In this notion

there is some truth, for he was a composer for the piano first

of all, and many of his orchestral works give the impression

of having been conceived for the piano and then scored, but

there is so much of pure beauty in them that we can well

forgive an occasional slip. Schumann was never a great mas-

ter of the orchestral idiom, like Wagner, Berlioz and Rich-

ard Strauss, but he wrote competently enough, after all, to

make his ideas dear, and those ideas were always supremely

well worth hearing. In his four symphonies one finds some

of the most magnificent symphonic music written since

Beethoven. It belongs to an altogether higher range than

the music of his old rival, Mendelssohn, and stands plainly

above the sonorous but maudlin stuff of such fellows as

Tschaikovsky. Here, however, comparisons begin to grow

difficult, for the symphony has undergone great changes in

late years, and it would be impossible to undertake any in-

telligible choice between the Schumann symphonies and the

huge orchestral works of Strauss and Mahler. When it comes

to Brahms but let us avoid trouble by forgetting old

Johannes. The Spring Symphony, as I have twice remarked,

opens with a rousing theme for trumpet and French Horns,

the which is at once repeated by the full orchestra fortis-

simo. It is, as Schumann himself said, the call of Spring, the

summons to be up and cavorting. A fiery passage follows,

Schumann 83

with the fiddles squeaking high up on the E string, and the

'cellos and bull-fiddles haw-hawing far below. Pan is

loose; the woods are awakening. Then comes, very softly, a

fragmentary restatement of the trumpet theme, this time for

wood-wind, and then a cadenza-like solo passage for the first

flute, and a sudden hurrying of the tempo. A few measures

further on the introduction glides beautifully into the first

movement proper. It opens with a gay theme made of the

trumpet call, and to the tail of it is hooked a rustling pas-

sage for the strings, delightfully suggestive of the breeze

blowing through greening trees. The second subject, first

given out by the clarinets and bassoons and kept in the

wood-wind throughout the movement, is a simple and

plaintive song, but the development is almost exclusively

concerned with the first subject, which is worked out with

the utmost ingenuity and effectiveness. Early in the develop-

ment section Schumann introduces the triangle, and in one

place actually gives it the theme. This use of it caused a

musical scandal in 1842, for the triangle, up to that time,

had not appeared in serious orchestral writing. (Today,

with tom-toms and wind-machines grown commonplace, it

seems old-fashioned.) Toward the end of the movement, a

third theme is heard, chiefly sung, like the second, by clari-

nets and bassoons. But it is, as it were, an afterthought, and

soon after it appears the movement comes to a brilliant

dose. The slow movement is a lovely song, at first for the

violins, and then, after a moment in the wood-wind, for the

"cellos. Toward the end it goes back to the wood-wind. One

theme suffices for the whole; the second is no more than an


echo of the first Fragments from the two are woven into an

exquisite fabric in the middle, but there is no real develop-

ment, and the whole thing, first and last, is no more than a

song with orchestral accompaniment. In this respect it

suggests the kst movement of Schubert's Unfinished Sym-

phony, another example of unsurpassable beauty wedded

to the starkest simplicity of design. As Philip H. Goepp

says, "the larghetto is one simple, sincere song, a stay of

merriment; but there is no sadness, rather a settled, deep

content." One lies under the trees and listens to the birds.

In the Gasthaus down under the hfll there is a pretty

Biermad'l. It is May Day.

The scherzo starts off in D minor, but its abounding ani-

mal spirits offer one more proof that the common super-

stition about the melancholy of the minor keys is a su-

perstition and no more. It has two trios and a number of

delightful changes in time and tempo, and ends with a

drum-roll in D major and a whisper in the reeds. Then the

whole orchestra plunges into the finale, an uproarious dance

with moments of pause and reflection. Two separate dance

themes, both of them extremely boisterous, stand in con-

trast to the main subject, and that subject itself is so con-

siderably modified that it takes on the aspect of a fourth

theme. Faint echoes of the trumpet call of the first move-

ment are heard; the piping grows fast and furious; it all

ends with a loud clatter. Schumann's finales are always

lively, but he never wrote a livelier. It has all the rhythmic

rattle of a bam dance; it almost suggests the celebrated hoe-

down finale of Dvofdk's "From the New World." One need

Schumann 85

know nothing whatsoever of music to respond to so deft a

tickling of the midriff. Unlike many other great composers

Schumann was not an infant prodigy. Again unlike the

majority, he was a man of easy means and seldom had to

work for money. Yet again, he differed from most in being a

university graduate and a man of wide and sound culture.

His father was a well-to-do publisher, and he himself was

designed for the law, and pursued the study of that laborious

science at the Universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg. His

parents were not musicians, and though they had him in-

structed in music in his childhood, as is almost the universal

custom in Germany, they opposed his adoption of a musi-

cal career, and it is probable that if his father had lived he

would have ended as a lawyer. But his father died when he

was 16, and he found his mother, though firmly opposed to

his plans, a good deal easier to wheedle. It was not, however,

until after four years of that wheedling that he finally in-

duced her to let him abandon his Institutes. She then put

the decision into the hands of Friedrich Wieck of Leipzig,

who not only made of the young Saxon one of the greatest

musicians of all time, but also (though unwillingly) pro-

vided him with the best wife that a great musician ever had.

This wife was Wieck's daughter, Clara. When Schumann

entered the Wieck household, in 1830, Ckra was a child of

1 1 years, and for four or five years thereafter he regarded her

as a little sister. In 1834, indeed, we find him betrothed to a

certain Countess Ernestine von Fricken, another pupil of

Wieck's, and writing to Clara about it. But it was not long

before he found that it was not the Countess that he loved


but little Clara, and after the summer of 1835 his wooing of

herwent on undisguised. Clara was willing, but Papa Wieck

refused to countenance the match, not only because she was

very young, but also and chiefly because he was unaccount-

ably suspicious of Schumann.

The latter, determined to have his way, appealed to the

Leipzig courts for permission to many Clara without her

father's consent, but the case dragged on for month after

month without a decision being reached, and in the end the

lovers waited until the day Clara was 21 years old. Schu-

mann was then 30.

No happier marriage is recorded in human history. Clara

was not only a beautiful and extremely good tempered girl,

but also one of the greatest pianists of her time, and the

rest of her long life she lived to be 77 and survived her

husband by 40 years was devoted chiefly to playing his

music. No one, it is probable, has ever played it better, and

surely no one has ever played it with greater devotion. She

was the founder of the Schumann cult, not only in Germanybut also in France, England and Russia, and in her old age

she was regarded with almost superstitious veneration bythe growing circle of Schumann disciples. Johannes Brahms

looked upon her almost as a mother, as he had looked uponSchumann as a father, and when she could play no longer

and poverty pressed upon her, he insisted upon making her

an allowance of 10,000 marks a year. Her death was a stag-

gering blow to Brahms, and he survived her by scarcely a

year.

Brahms' devotion was not merely sentimental; he owed

Schumann 87

well nigh everything to the Schumann's paper, the Neue

Zeitschrift fur Musik, that made a celebrity of him, and he

was welcomed as a son in the Schumann home. The elder

composer was always alert for fresh talent, and his influence

upon the development of music in his time was due even

more to his critical penetration and enthusiasm than to his

actual compositions. So long as he wrote for it, the Zeit-

schrift remained the foremost musical authority of Ger-

many, and hence of the world. He not only wrote with

sound understanding, but also with uncommon grace and

charm, and some of his articles hold a secure place amongthe classics of criticism. Many of them were cast in the

form of discussions among the members of a mythical

brotherhood of musicians called the Davidsbund, the chiefs

of which were Florestan and Eusebius, and Schumann

sometimes used one or another of these names in signing

his articles. The Florestan Club5of Baltimore got its name

from Schumann's Florestan.

The composer was a man of rugged frame and distin-

guished appearance, but there was a neurotic element in

him which early showed itself, and in the end he suffered a

derangement in mind. On February 27, 1854, in a fit of

melancholy, he left his home at Dtissddorf and threw him-

self into the Rhine. He was recognized and taken home, but

at his own request he was soon afterward removed to a pri-

5 "Florestan" is the happy hero in Schumann's piano composi-

tion, "Davidsbundler." The dub was comprised of leading profes-

sional and amateur music lovers. Among the members were several

from the Saturday Night Club, induding Mendcen. The dub

lasted about six years.


vate insane asylum near Bonn. In 1855 he improved greatiy

and was able to write letters and to receive visits from his

friends, but he never recovered sufficiently to resume com-

position. He died on July 29, 1856, in the arms of his faith-

ful wife. She survived until May 20, 1896.

Schumann's fame, while he lived, was greatly over-

shadowed by the much more showy celebrity of Mendels-

sohn. He himself helped to establish this false valuation byhis extremely generous praise of his great rival. Outside of

Germany, in particular, he was underestimated for a long

while. But during the last 40 years he has come into his

own, and today he ranks among the undisputed masters of

the tonal art, with only such colossi as Bach, Beethoven and

Mozart clearly above him. So greatly has the estimation of

him grown, indeed, that, by a sort of reaction, the talents

of Mendelssohn have come to be pooh-poohed. Schumann,

if he were alive, would be taking measures against too ar-

dent transvaluation. No one understood Mendelssohn

better than he did, and no one could more clearly discern

the very real genius behind the superficial elegance of the

fashionable composer. Schumann, you may be sure, would

not be forgetting that it was Mendelssohn who resurrected

Bach, and made the world acknowledge his imperial dignity.

Mendeksohn

Mendelssohn

(1809-47)

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, 1910.

ON THE HUNDRED and first birthday of Felix Mendelssohn-

Bartholdy, who was born at Hamburg February 3, 1809,

the world finds itself rather painfully undecided as to his

true rank in music. While he lived there was no such un-

certainty, for London and Leipzig, and even Paris and

Vienna, joined in hailing him as the first musical gentleman

of Europe. No other composer or conductor ever enjoyed

such extravagant adulation. He was the acknowledged em-

peror of the baton; his pilgrimages from city to city were

triumphal progresses: every new composition from his facile

pen reduced the world to stupefied amazement and admi-

ration.

Naturally enough, that sort of worship could not last.

When Mendelssohn died, at the age of 38, there were al-

ready mad mullahs who preached a holy war against him,

and soon afterward they began to make multitudes of con-

verts. According to one critic, the whole history of music

since then has been a history of Mendelssohn's decline and

Schumann's rise. Today there is a wide disposition to dis-

miss the greatest of Gewandhaus stars with a patronizing

smile, as an elegant young man who had creditable ideals

and did his best, but never got very far. His "Elijah", we are

told, is headed toward the massed choirs of Youngstown and


Kalamazoo; his "Midsummer Night's Dream" music has a

saccharine smack and his Italian symphony, heard after the

inflammatory tone-poems of the moment, induce a fitful

and uncomfortable slumber.

So, at least, say the judges who sit solemnly in the musi-

cal sanhedrim, and it may be admitted without hesitation

that many of the counts in their indictment are well

founded. No one would dream today of comparing the

Scotch Symphony to the Third and Fifth of Beethoven, nor

even to the Second, and yet that very thing was done by

the exuberant Leipzigers in the month of March, 1842,

when its banal strophes first fell upon their ears. In the same

way the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music has long

ceased to lift audiences to their feet, and it is becoming

more and more difficult for piano players to get money for

performing his fantasias and variations. Beside our latter-

day tone-masters and the giants of all time Mendelssohn

seems puny enough. One finds no truly moving content in

his music: it touches the deeper emotions but seldom: more

often it is merely pretty.

But who shall deny the charm of that prettiness? Where,

in all music, do musical phrases lead us so delightfully to

fairyland as in Mendelssohn's score for Shakespeare's im-

mortal fantasy? What other composer has ever entered, with

so much feeling and understanding, into the great Eliza-

bethan's romantic mood? But Aristophanes, of course, was

not Euripides, and so it is not surprising that when Men-

delssohn tackled tragedy the effect was that of Corot paint-

ing a battiepiece. Like all young men of the thirties, he was

Dvoftffe (An American Symphony) 91

a romanticist, but he was too civilized to yield to gusty

emotions. A man, to do that, must be something of a bar-

barian, as Beethoven was, and Bach and Wagner. Mendels-

sohn was no barbarian.

And yet, as we have observed, the world must grant him

splendid gifts. His talent always trembled upon the brink

of genius. In his Violin Concerto, in some of his quartets,

in "Elijah", and even in his piano music, there are purple

moments which suggest the notion that a true poet mayhave lurked beneath the fashionable exterior. Mendelssohn

died at 38, at which age Beethoven was just coming to ar-

tistic maturity. What he might have given to us had he lived

through another generation is beyond all prophecy, but we

may well speak of the things he did give us with profound

respect. If it is true, as the learned tell us, that he missed real

greatness, it is certainly no less true that he missed it by no

more than a hairbreadth.

DvoHk

( 1841-1904)

AN AMERICAN SYMPHONY

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, October 19, 1916.

ANTONIN Dvolta's symphony, "Z nov6ho sv&a" (From

the New World) which Mr. Strube and his estimable tone-


artists are to unroll at the Lyric on Friday evening, was

written in 1894 or thereabouts, while old Antonin was

undergoing three years' penal servitude in New York. Hehad come to America in 1892 to become director of a con-

servatory, and, like many other visiting musicians (for ex-

ample, Paderewski) he had been greatly intrigued by the

lively niggerish swing of American popular music. The re-

sult was that he gave a lot of hard study to American folk-

song, and particularly to the folk-song of the Negroes, and

the second result was a group of three very excellent com-

positions his string quartet in F, his string quintet in Eflat and the aforesaid "From the New World."

The latter made an immediate success and has since re-

mained one of the most popular works in the classical

repertoire. A fashion of sniffling at it has grown up amongthe musical pundits, but the fact is not of much signifi-

cance, for exactly the same sniffs are directed at a number

of indubitable masterpieces, including Beethoven's incom-

parable Eighth Symphony, which Mr. Strube presented last

season. The truth is that "From the New World" is a first-

rate work of art, honestly constructed and superbly written.

It is clear; it is ingenious; it is sound; it is beautiful. If, made

mellow by its luscious phrases, you find yourself rolling

your eyes at the performance, then please, I prithee, do not

blush. It is well worth an oscillation or two of even the

most cultured eye. You will search a long while, indeed,

among the symphonies of these later years before you find

better writing and better music.

The question as to how much of the work is Bohemian

Dvofdk (An American Symphony) 93

and how much American has long engaged those who de-

light in musical anatomizing, and the weight of opinion

seems to be that the composer's nationality over-balanced

his purpose, which was to introduce Americans to their

own music. The verdict is both platitudinous and unsound.

It is platitudinous because all art is revealed in terms of the

artist's temperament, and in Dvorak's case temperament

was indistinguishable from nationality. He was, indeed a

Bohemian of the Bohemians, and he could no more conceal

the fact when he sat down to write music than he could

change the contours of his peculiarly baroque and dog-like

visage. And it is unsound because even the most cursory

examination shows enough genuine niggerishness in his

symphony to outfit a Kerry Mills. He was not trying, re-

member, to write a suite in ragtime; he was trying to write a

symphony a thing rigid in its design and even in its de-

tails. The form he worked in was German and the tempera-

ment he brought to the business was Bohemian, but the

materials he made use of were at least two-thirds American,

and so he was quite right in calling the product an American

symphony.

If you don't believe it get a good edition of the Jubilee

Songs and the score of the symphony and go through them

at the piano on some quiet Sunday afternoon. In the very

first subject of the first movement you will find a plain

reminiscence of "Roll, Jordan, Roll'', and in the character-

istic jumpy figure which immediately follows (and which

holds together the whole first movement) you will en-

counter an old friend. This figure, perhaps, cannot be traced


to any definite Negro song or dance, but it is nevertheless as

indubitably niggerish as hog and hominy. And out of it

(first tooted by the woodwind, and then taken up by the

strings) there grows a subject which strangely suggests

'Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?", and on top of it there

comes a palpable borrowing from "Oh, Redeemed", un-

changed even in key. These three subjects, beautifully

worked out, supply the materials of the whole first move-

ment. Nothing else is in it. And all three come straight from

the Jubilee Songs.

The other movements show fewer direct borrowings.

They are, indeed, rather paraphrases of American music

than direct imitations of it. Dvorak, one fancies, was in-

spired to undertake the work by the powerful appeal of one

or two tunes, especially "Roll, Jordan, Roll" and ex-

hausted them in his first movement. But in the second

movement the succulent and famous largo there is still a

dear echo from the plantation. The curve of the melody is

his own, but the rhythm owes much to such songs as "No-

body Knows the Trouble I See", and "Rise, Mourners", and

the plaintive, wailing spirit of Negro music is in every meas-

ure of it. Turn to "Many Thousands Gone", so beautifully

realized in later years by S. Coleridge-Taylor, and you will

note the kinship at once. Even in the wild episode which

breaks into the lament there is true Negro color. No Negro,

it may be admitted, ever danced to this precise tune, but

many a Negro has shaken his legs to tunes curiously like it.

The scherzo goes further afield. One discerns in it manycharacteristic fragments of Negro rhythm, but melodically


it is sophisticated and European. Its two surpassingly

beautiful episodes are wholly beyond the range of Negro

song; they suggest Schubert, not Booker Washington.

Moreover, the very time signature is exotic, for the blacka-

moor almost invariably hoofs his fandangos and sets up his

caterwauling in four-four time; the triple measure belongs to

the late stage of musical evolution. But in the last move-

ment a very fine piece of writing Dvofdk returns to his

muttons. Here, as in the largo, it is difficult to track down

definite sources, but here again the swing and color are

unmistakably niggerish. The thing starts off with a loud

braying and stamping of feet; it proceeds to a wild hoe-

down; it ends in whoops and snorts that die down to whis-

pers. For all its prodigality of melody, a Negro-like mo-

notony is in it; the violas drone a fierce and savage figure

while woodwind and fiddles sport with fragments from the

second and third movements above them. And toward the

end, against a musical fabric made up of these figures and

others, all the choirs in their turn fling a barbarous synco-

pated phrase that infallibly suggests the loud cries of a Ne-

gro dance.

The last movement, it is true, contains some of the best

writing that Dvofdk ever did. It is, for him, extremely com-

plex in structure; there is scarcely a moment of pure ho-

mophony, the polyphonic web is elaborately woven. And

yet; for all that intricacy of design, there is perfect clarity in

it, and even a sort of naked simplicity. One feels that he has

gone beyond the plantation songs to the rude and violent

chants of the jungje; the atmosphere is one of frank sav-


agery; it is difficult to listen to the rash of sound without

being stirred.

But the first movement, after all, is the most remarkable

of the four, for in it Dvof k accomplishes something that he

seldom accomplished elsewhere. That is to say, he sticks to

the strict sonata form, without episodes, and is almost as

austere in his use of materials as Brahms. The old fellow

was not at ease in this sort of writing. His natural bent was

toward a gigantic and somewhat disorderly piling up of

ideas, as in his Dumky trio, his string quartets and the

scherzo of the present symphony. So many melodies buzzed

in his head that it was hard for him to settle down to the

laborious development of two or three; new ones were al-

ways pressing to be heard. But here, as I say, he retained his

Bohemian exuberance with German Zucht, and the result

is a very fine piece of writing, indeed.

On the side of instrumentation the whole symphony is ex-

tremely lovely. Dvorak's long years of service in the or-

chestra pit gave him a firm grip upon all the tricks, and so

his score glows with gorgeous colors. Give your ear to the

largo if you would hear a perfect concord of sounds. From

the incomparable opening chords to the last arpeggio of

the muted violins there is one long procession of beauties.

And in the last movement, again, he shows himself a genu-

ine master of the orchestra. The thing often sounds bar-

barously harsh and naif, but there is deft and thoughtful

workmanship in every measure of it.

Dvofek was the son of a Bohemian tavern-keeper and

butcher, and his father designed him for the latter art. But


he took to playing the fiddle in his nonage and soon became

so proficient that he decided to study music. This, however,

was easier planned than done, for the elder Dvorik was

poor and there were few competent teachers in the neighbor-

hood. When he was 12 years old he was sent to a town

called Zlonitz, where an uncle lived, and there he had some

lessons from an organist named Leihmann. Regarding this

Leihmann the chronicle is otherwise silent, but he seems to

have taught young Antonin the rudiments of organ-playing

and enough harmony to keep him going. His first composi-

tion belongs to this period. It was a polka for the village

band at home. The polka itself seems to have been very

creditable, but in scoring it the boy forgot to transpose the

trumpet part, and so the first performance ended with yells

for the police.

Late in his teens Dvoirdk went to Prague, and there, for a

good many years, he played the fiddle in theater orchestras

and made a scanty living teaching. All the while he was

piling up compositions on his shelf songs, string quartets,

operettas, even a symphony or two. Most of these things

were unperformed: there seemed little likelihood that he

would ever be heard of beyond the town. He was 32 years

old before he got his chance. It came when he was com-

missoned to write music for a cantata by Hflek, a favorite

Bohemian poet. The result was "Die Erben des Weissen

Berges" ("The Heirs of the White Mountains") . It made a

considerable success, and some of Antonin's cobwebbed

compositions were exhumed and performed, including a

symphony in E flat never published. But this success led to


little, and Dvorak remained unknown in the great world

until he was discovered by Brahms in 1877. Brahms then

did for him what Schumann, years before, had done for

Brahms himself; that is, he advised him, encouraged him

and, more important still, talked about him. A year later

Dvofdk published his "Slavische Tanze" and was a made

man. These dances swept through Germany as Brahms'

Hungarian dances had swept through it a few years before.

The musical publishers, once so coy, now besieged the com-

poser with offers, and he answered them with a flood of

manuscripts. By 1880 he was securely on his legs.

Hans von Biilow, a sincere admirer of Dvorak, almost

cooked his goose for him by calling him "Der Bauer im

Frack" (the peasant in a dress-coat). This apt and yet un-

fortunate label has stuck to him ever since, and most criti-

cism of his work has taken color from it. The result is that

he is commonly regarded as a sort of inspired clodhopper,

with a fine musical gift but with little genuine musical skill.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that

Dvo&k, though almost self-taught, acquired a sound and

sure command of the methods of composition, and that his

best work is highly discreet and sophisticated. He had a

better command of polyphony, indeed, than Schubert, but

like Schubert he was often carried away by the exuberance

of his own verbosity. Melodies gurgled from him like cider

from a jug; he could scarcely get one to paper before an-

other came bubbling out. The consequence, particularly in

his early compositions, is a confusing oversupply of ma-


terials. They seem, at times, to be no more than disorderly

strings of unrelated episodes.

But in his later years he made a deliberate effort to bring

his genius into better discipline, and the effects of that ef-

fort are plainly to be seen in the New World symphony.

The first movement, in particular, is full of evidence of a re-

straining intent. The three subjects, for all their barbaric

color, are still somewhat terse and austere that is, for

Dvorak and their working out is carried on with a relent-

lessness that he seldom shows anywhere else. No episodes

creep in to relieve and corrupt the business; what other ma-

terial is used (putting aside the monotonous, jiggling figure

which runs from end to end) is manifestly derived from

them; the whole thing hangs together; there is unbroken

clarity in it.

In the largo the composer returns to easier devices. The

form is that of a simple lyric, with a sharp and characteristic

change of mood in the middle section. This is the sort of

writing that came most gratefully to Dvof^Fs hand; one

finds it again in the most familiar of all his compositions,

the celebrated "Humoresque." And in the scherzo, as has

been said, two episodes of extraordinary beauty are dragged

in, almost by the heels. But in the gaudy and turbulent last

movement, for all the piling up of tunes, there is a return to

letter form, and toward the end of it the composer rises to

brilliant heights. Here the whole symphony is rehearsed.

Bits of the first and second movements are borrowed to

adorn the fabric; there are violent contrasts in tempo,

ioo H. L. Mencken ON Music

rhythm and dynamics; the thing goes with a rush that con-

ceals its ingenuity of design and execution.

Dvorak had a hard time of it as a young man. His salary

at Prague, where he was organist for a while, was $80 a year.

But after success overtook him, toward middle life, he

prospered financially as well as artistically, and during his

three years in New York he received $15,000 a year, besides

what he could make playing at weddings. A portrait of the

period, printed in Grove's Dictionary of Music, shows him

elegantly accoutered, with no less than three diamond horse-

shoes in his cravat In 1891 he was given the degree of doc-

tor of music by Cambridge University. He died on May i,

1904.

OPERAS

AND OPERETTAS

Opera

From The AMed Arts, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 197-200.

First printed in the New York Evening McaZ, Feb. 22, 1918.

Included in A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY, 1949, pp. 545-7-

OPERA, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty, must in-

evitably appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only because it

presents aujalbeauty in a frame of purely visual gaudiness,

with overtones of the grossest sexual provocation. It is

chiefly supported in all countries by the same sort of wealthy

sensualists who also support musical comedy. One finds in

the directors' room the traditional stock company of the

stage-door alley. Such vermin, of course, pose in the news-

papers as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art. But

one has merely to observe the sort of opera they think is

good to get the measure of their actual artistic discrimina-

tion.

The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of

opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is

no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing


through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to hear operatic

music outside the opera house; that is why one so often

hears such lowly things, say, as 'The Ride of the Valkyrie"

in the concert hall. "The Ride of the Valkyrie" has a certain

intrinsic value as pure music; played by a competent or-

chestra it may give civilized pleasure. But as it is com-

monly performed in an opera house, with a posse of fat

beldames throwing themselves about the stage, it can only

produce the effect of a dose ofipecacuaEfh^.The

sort of per-

son who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of

person who delights in gas-pipe furniture. Such half-wits are

in a majority in every opera house west of the Rhine. They

go to the opera, not to hear music, not even to hear bad

music, but merely to see a more or less obscene circus. Afew, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist in

that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashion-

ables, to enchant the yokelry with their splendor. But the

majority must be content with the more modest aim. What

they get for the outrageous prices they pay for seats is a

chikce to feast their eyes upon glittering members of the

superior demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls be-

fore magnificoes on their own side of the footlights. Theyesteem a performance, not in proportion as true music is on

tap, but in proportion as the display of notorious characters

on the stage is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the

boxes is lavish. A soprano who can gargle her way up to F

sharp in alt is more to such simple souls than a whole drove

of Johann Sebastian Ba&is; her one real rival in the entire

domain of art is the contralto who has a pension from a

Opera 103

former grand duke and is reported to be enceinte by several

stockbrokers.

The music that such ignobles applaud is often quite as

shoddy as they are themselves. To write a successful opera a

knowledge of harmony and counterpoint is not enough;

one must also be a sort of Barnum. All the first-rate musi-

cians who have triumphed in the opera house have been

skillful mountebanks as well. I need cite only Wagner and

Richard Strauss. The business, indeed, has almost nothing

to do with music. All the actual music one finds in many a

popular opera for example, "Thais" mounts up to less

than one may find in a pair of Gungl waltzes. It is not this

mild flavor of tone that fetches the crowd; it is the tinpot

show that goes with it. An opera may have plenty of good

music in it and fail, but if it has a good enough show it will

succeed.

Such a composer as Wagner, of course, could not write

even an opera without getting some music into it. In all of

his works, even including "Parsifal", there are magnificent

passages, and some of them are very long. Here his natal

genius overcame him, and he forgot temporarily what it

was about But these magnificent passages pass unnoticed

by the average opera audience. What it esteems in his mu-

sic dramas is precisely what is cheapest and most mounte-

bankish for example, the more lascivious parts of "Tristan

und Isolde/' The sound music it dismisses as tedious. The

Wagner it venerates is not the musiciafi, but the showman.

That he had a king for a backer aiM was seduced by Liszt*s

daughter these facts, and not the fact of his stupen-


dous talent, are the foundation stones of his fame in the

opera house.

Greater men, lacking his touch of the quack, have failed

where he succeeded Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann,

Brahms, Bach, Haydn. Not one of them produced a genu-

inely successful opera; most of them didn't even try. Im-

agine Brahms writing for the diamond horseshoe! Or Bach!

Or Haydn! Beethoven attempted it, but made a mess of it;

"Fictelio" survives today chiefly as a set of concert overtures.

Schubert wrote more actual music every morning between

10 o'clock and lunch time than the average opera composer

produces in 250 years, yet he always came a cropper in the

opera house.

Grand Opera in English

From the Baltimore Herdd, July 11, 1905.

OF ALL the theatrical or musical organizations that make

annual visits to Baltimore, none is more heartily greeted and

none more richly deserves public approval and support than

the English Opera Company, managed by Col. Henry W.

Savage. Organized a dozen years ago for the presentation of

the better sort of light operas, it ran the gamut of Offenbach,

Strauss and von Suppe. Then, struck by the fact that the

American people liberally patronized German and French

operettas sung in English, when these identical pieces, sung

in German or French, were little encouraged, Colonel Sav-

Grand Opera in English 105

age came to the conclusion that the same thing would be

true of the grand operas.

If we are not mistaken, the work he selected for his experi-

ment was "II Trovatore." Whatever was the opera, the re-

sult was a triumph, and since then the Savage company has

sung nearly all the masterpieces of the world's great com-

posers of dramatic music. Last year the repertoire included

operas by Wagner, Verdi, Bizet, Puccini and Mascagni, and

a second company, organized on the same principle, pre-

sented Wagner's religious music drama, "Parsifal/' The

latter organization attracted larger audiences than the

Metropolitan Opera Company, despite its lack of celebrated

stars, and the lesson of the season was that, given painstak-

ing performances in English at reasonable prices, American

audiences will cheerfully patronize grand opera.

There is no more reason why "II Trovatore" should be

sung in Italianxthan there is that "Cyrano de Bergerac"

should be played in French or "A Doll's House" in Nor-

wegian. The libretto is not the important half of an opera,

but it is comforting to be able to understand it. As Col.

Savage's companies sing them, the books of such pieces as

"Lohengrin" and "La Boh&ne" are easily comprehensible.

That this fact adds infinitely to the enjoyment of the per-

1During the intervening 55 years since this article was written

many of the foreign-language operas have been produced in Eng-lish. However, it is stifl a controversial matter because the words,

when translated into English do not fit the music as well as the

words of the original language. Furthermore, there is almost in-

evitable distortion when words are sung, regardless of which lan-

guage is set to tone.


formance is one recognized so many years ago that it is sur-

prising that no other American manager ever thought of it.

Joseph Addison, writing in the eighteenth number of the

Spectator, on March 21, 1710, inveighed against the cus-

tom, then rapidly growing, of singing operas in Italian on

the London stage.

'"We no longer/' he said, "understand the language of our

stage; insomuch that I have often been afraid, when I have

seen our Italian performers chattering in the vehemence of

action, that they have been calling us names and abusing us

among themselves. In the meantime I cannot forbear think-

ing how naturally an historian who writes two or three

hundred years hence, and does not know the taste of his

wise forefathers, will make the following reflection: In the

beginning of the eighteenth century, the Italian tongue was

so well understood in England that operas were acted on the

public stage in that language!'"

And yet it took nearly two hundred years for a man to

read the lesson in this protest and make a fortune by it. Let

Colonel Savage roll up his millions! He deserves them.

The Tower Duet in II Trovatore

Extracted from Mencken's review in the Baltimore Herald,

January i, 1905.

. . . How WELL it was sung, and how simply! even if Mr.

Sheehan, who is a gentleman of no small heft, did seem to

The Mikado 107

stand in fear of falling from the window into the subcellar

of the tower. There was no platform in the tower and

Mr. Sheehan had to climb a ladder to reach the window. As

he arose he began

"Ah! how death still delayeth,

Lingers, or seems to fly,

From him who longeth,

From him who longeth to die!"

Not until the second longeth" did his curly black hair

appear above the sill of the barred window, and not until he

was near the end of "Farewell, love! Farewell, Leonora!

Farewell!" did he summon up courage to grip the bars and

lean out between them. His exit, too, was made painfully

and fearfully, and Leonora, singing plaintively below, was

plainly apprehensive lest he slip and come crashing down

upon her 200 pounds of healthy tenor, full of entrancing

melody. . . .

The Mikado


THE MEMORABLE first performance of this greatest of light

musical pieces was given on March 14, 1885, at the Savoy

Theater in London, the scene of all Gilbert and Sullivan

first nights for 15 years. "Pinafore" had gone before, and it

seemed impossible that the stupendous success of that de-

io8 H. L. Mencken ON Music

lightful piece should be repeated by the new one, but never-

theless the miracle was achieved. "The Mikado" took

London by storm, and soon afterward it took the world by

storm. Before the end of 1885 it was being played in Europe

and America by fully 1 50 companies. One night, in October

in this country alone, there were no less than 117 perform-

ances.

Some cities for awhile supported two, or even more,

"Mikado" troupes. This was the case, for example, in Balti-

more. The late John T. Ford bought the local rights to the

piece from John Stetson and John A. McCaull, who had

acquired the American rights from the author and com-

poser, and it was planned that the piece should be given its

first Baltimore performance at Ford's Opera House on the

night of August 25, 1885, with George W. Denham, Pauline

Harvey and other excellent old-timers in the cast. But

meanwhile, a man named S. W. Fort, who was managing a

small opera company at the Academy of Music, got hold

of the score of the piece and proceeded to put it in rehearsal,

rights or no rights. On August 17, a week before the an-

nounced date of the Ford opening, "The Mikado" was thus

produced.

Mr. Ford at once proceeded to tackle Fort in the courts,

but judicial processes, then as now, were exasperatingly

slow, and it was a long while before the case was heard and

disposed of. Meanwhile, the actual combat of company and

company had come to a quicker and more satisfactory

issue. That is to say, the Ford company, when it began busi-

ness on August 25, at once took the shine from the efforts

The Mikado 109

of the Fort company. Before long the only persons going to

the Academy of Music to see "The Mikado'7

were those who

could not squeeze their way into Ford's, which was packed

from orchestra pit to frescoing at every performance. So

Fort gave up the ghost.

Somewhat similar battles were fought out in all of the

larger cities of the country. In those days the United States

had no copyright treaty with England, and in consequence

the rights of Gilbert and Sullivan had but little standing in

our courts. American managers were not slow to take ad-

vantage of the fact. In the face of common justice and

decency they produced the new opera, paying nothing for

the privilege and relying upon the courts to stand by them.

In New York the result was a bitter suit between Stetson

and McCaull on the one side and Sydney Rosenfeld and

H. C. Milner on the other.

Rosenfeld at that time was a dramatic hack in large prac-

tice, and it fell to his lot to "adapt" and enliven with native

wit nine-tenths of the operettas imported (duty free) by the

Broadway managers. It was in this manner that the libretto

of "The Mikado" fell into his hands. Let it be said for him

that whatever his failings otherwise, he had at least sense

enough to see that it was impossible to improve upon Gil-

bert's humor. That is to say, he did little more than add a

few stanzas to the topical songs; but the fact remained that

he was a party to the pirating of the opera, and so Stetson

and McCaull sued him for damages, and he was haled be-

fore a serpent of wisdom called Diwer, I.

Diwer was an Ulster man, and a foe to all foes of the

i 10 H. L. Mencken ON Music

Irish. Therefore, when he heard that a man with the sus-

piciously Asiatic appellation of Rosenfeld was accused of

making off with the goods of a man bearing the glorious old

Gaelic name of Sullivan, he began to work his eyebrows

menacingly and to bombard Rosenfeld with searching

questions. On the Sullivan side, too, was the aforesaid

McCaull, alas, who threw away these advantages. First of

all, he admitted on the stand that he was a Kentuckian by

birth and had never been in Ireland; secondly, he made a

number of laughable mistakes in Irish geography; and

thirdly, he let loose the awful secret that Sullivan was not an

Irishman at all, but a loyal Englishman.

Rosenfeld won. The decision of the court was to the

effect that there was no remedy at law for offenses com-

mitted against Englishmen by free American citizens.

Whether or not Gilbert and Sullivan had really written

"The Mikado" as claimed in their bill of complaint, was

beside the point. The important thing was that they were

foreigners who sought to set up a hateful monopoly on

American soil. The courts of certain other states took a

different view of the matter, but in general the absence of a

copyright treaty made it practically impossible for Gilbert

and Sullivan to enforce their rights, and so piracy went on.

Within a few months, as has been mentioned, there were

no less than 117 "Mikado" companies on the road.

The people of the United States were "Mikado" crazy for

a year or more, as they had been "Pinafore" crazy some time

before. Things Japanese acquired an absurd vogue. Womencarried Japanese fans and wore Japanese kimonos and

The Mikado 111

dressed their hair in some approach to the Japanese manner.

The mincing step of Yum-Yum appeared in the land; chop-

suey, mistaken for a Japanese dish, became a naturalized

victual; the Mikado's yearning to make the punishment fit

the crime gave the common speech a new phrase; parlor wits

repeated, with never-failing success, the lordly Pooh-Bah's

remark about the "corroborative detail designed to lend

verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing nar-

rative"; his other remark, about the ultimate globule of pri-

mordial protoplasm, engendered a public interest in biology

and sent the common people to the pages of Darwin, then a

mere heretic and the favorite butt ofwindy homiletes.

Altogether, 'The Mikado" left a deep mark upon the

United States. It aroused a liking for dean humor, for gram-

matical music, for good taste on the stage, which has never

wholly died out, despite the rise of slapstick musical

comedy, with its obscene jokes, its deafening cacophony

and its displays of lingerie. The opportunity is here for an-

other Sullivan. A new comic opera of 'The Mikado's"

quality would make a success so startling that the hits of

"Florodora", "The Belle of New York" and other such flap-

doodle would be forgotten.

112 H.L. Mencken ON Music

The Passing of Gilbert

(i 836-191 i )


How THE COMMON American conception of the English,

as a stodgy and humorless folk, could so long withstand the

fact of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas must ever remain one

of the mysteries of international misunderstanding. Here,

indeed, was wit that Aristophanes might have fathered; here

was humor that Rabelais might have been proud to own.

And yet it was the work of a thorough and unmitigated

Englishman of William Schwenck Gilbert, to wit a man

born in the heart of London, and one who seldom passed,

in all his 75 years, out of hearing of Bow Bells.

Gilbert died yesterday perhaps 15 years too late. His

career really ended in 1896, when he and Sir Arthur Sullivan

wrote 'The Grand Duke", their last joint work. They had

quarreled before and made up. Now they quarreled for

good Sullivan, searching about for a new partner, found

that there was but one Gilbert. Basil Hood, Comyns Carr

and Arthur Wing Pinero tried their hands and failed. AndGilbert himself, seeking a new Sullivan, learned that a newSullivan was not be found. Edward German came nearest

but 'The Emerald Isle" was still miles from 'The Mi-

kado."

The Gilbert and Sullivan partnership, in truth, was ab-

solutely unique. One looks in vain for parallels. Beaumont

The Passing of Gilbert 113

and Fletcher, Meilhac and Hal6vy, the Goncourte these

come to mind, but differences at once appear. Sullivan,

without Gilbert, seemed to lose the gift of melody, and

Gilbert, without Sullivan was parted from that exquisite

humor which made him, even above Mark Twain, the

merrymaker of his generation. The two men, working to-

gether for 15 years, found it impossible, after their separa-

tion, to work alone. Sullivan, cast adrift, took to the writing

of oratorios and presently died. Gilbert settled down as a

London magistrate and convulsed the world no longer.

The great quality of Gilbert's humor was its undying

freshness, an apparent spontaneity which familiarity could

not stale . . . "The Mikado" was given in Baltimore last

year without the change of a line. Not one of Gilbert's jests

of 1885 was omitted; not a single 'local hit" was inserted to

help out the comedians. And yet, after a quarter of a cen-

tury, how delightfully brisk and breezy it seemedl How the

crowds laughed once more at Pooh Bah's grotesque speeches

and at the Mikado's incomparable songl And how Sullivan's

tripping music tickled the ear!

The world will be a long while forgetting Gilbert and

Sullivan, Every spring their great works will be revived. At

this very moment "Pinafore", now 23 years old, is under

way inNew York. They made enormous contributions to the

pleasure of the race. They left the world merrier than they

found it. They were men whose lives were rich with honest

striving and high achievement and useful service.

1 14 H. L. Mencken ON Music

Pinafore at 33

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, 1911.

"PINAFORE" made a hit in New York the other night for

the twentieth or thirtieth time in 33 years. How well that

tripping Sullivan music wears; how fresh those Gilbert jokes

seem after a third of a century! The operettas of Johann

Strauss II are as dead, in this country, as the parlor melo-

dramas of Bronson-Howard and Augustin Daly; Milloecker

and Lecocq are forgotten; even Offenbach's devilish tunes

are heard no more. But once a year, at the very least, we

have a grand revival of "Pinafore" or "The Mikado", with

lesser revivals between, and almost always the manager who

makes the venture gets his money back, and a few extra

banknotes for his pains. "The Mikado" was here last winter

badly sung, but still drawing crowds. And the innumer-

able Abora companies fall back upon it or upon "Pinafore"

whenever "The Bohemian Girl" grows stale and folks tire of

"Robin Hood."

"Pinafore" had its first performance on any stage at the

Opera Comique in London, on May 25, 1878. It made an

instantaneous and colossal success, but not until late in the

following autumn did it reach the United States. The first

American performance was at the Old Boston Museum, on

November 25, 1878, with Marie Wainwright as Josephineand Saide Martinot as Hebe. During Christmas week the

late John T. Ford presented the piece in Baltimore, with

Pinafore of 33 "5

Blanche Chapman as Josephine. At the start Baltimore

viewed it coldly, but soon crowds went flocking to hear it,

and by and by it became so amazingly popular that there

was profitable patronage, in this one town, for two com-

panies and the whole United States for a hundredl

Before or since, the American stage has never seen an-

other such success. "Florodora" was a hit in its day, and so

was 'The Merry Widow", and so was 'The Belle of New

York", but the hit of "Pinafore" was greater than all of these

rolled together. The wheezes of the libretto passed into the

common speech; the music was upon the air of the country

from dawn to dawn. At one time, it is said, no fewer than

160 performances were given in one night by pre-

tentious companies of good singers, by companies of chil-

dren, by troupes of amateurs. Every fourth church choir

tried the game. Pinafore threatened to become a separate

trade a profession within a profession like Unde-Tom-

ming. Scores of fair warblers, later to delight us in other

roles, made their bows as Josephine; scores of actors, male,

not forgetting Richard Mansfield, got their starts as Dick

Deadeye.

After a while, of course, the craze died down. 'The

Pirates of Penzance" and "Patience" followed quickly, with

"lolanthe." After them, in 1885, came 'The Mikado", and

another smashing hit. But "Pinafore", through all the years,

has held the palm. No other comic opera ever written no

other stage play, indeed, of any sort was ever so popular.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" may have more performances to its

credit in the United States, but "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has


never crossed the seas. "Pinafore", however, has been given,

and with great success, wherever there are theaters from

Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Cape Town to Shanghai; in

Madrid, Ottawa and Melbourne; even in Paris, Rome,Vienna and Berlin.

BAND MUSIC

Italian Bands


IN MANY a perfumed, colytic barber shop, at this greening

season, the head barber, when a hiatus appears in the

procession of customers, retires to the ante-chamber behind

the steam massaging engine and practices difficult trills and

cadenzas upon the Bb clarinet or, perchance, upon the

silver-plated baritone, or mayhap, upon the trombone or

slip-horn. In brief, the summer park season dawns, and

the dashing gentlemen of the Italian bands prepare for the

fray. There is no work for Italian bands in winter, and so

many of their members turn temporarily to the humbler

arts barbering, clothing cutting, poetry, boilermaking,

politics or what not But when the bock beer signs appear

and the birds begin to chirp in the trees, then the call of

harmony reaches them and their thoughts turn once again

to the "William Tell" overture, the sextet from "Lucia di

Lammermoor", the anvil chorus from "II Trovatore" and

all the other well-loved compositions of their repertoire.

No need to sing the praises of the Italian bands. We have

all listened spell-bound to their spirited, blood-stirring

n8 H. L. Mencken ON Music

music. Even when they play out of tune, with their trumpets

screeching abominably and their tempi sadly obfuscated,

there is yet a certain magic in their tunes. An Italian

cornettist, or clarinetist or ophicleidist never loafs upon his

job. He is at it, hammer and tongs, from the drop of the

hat He blows until his hair stands on end and his carotid

arteries swell like soap bubbles and his ears grow a deep,

effulgent crimson and his lungs seem about to flyto pieces.

It is not work to him, but play; he loves music; he is having

the time of his life. Frigid, indeed, is the hearer who can

hearken unto such joyous blasts and not answer with sym-

pathetic grunts.

The art of music in the United States owes a great debt

to the hurricanic and romantic Italians. Before they began

to fill the band stands of our summer parks the prevailing

taste among us was for music of the cheapest and most

trivial sort. Our native bands played ragtime endlessly, and

they played it very badly. The marches of Sousa represented

the Himalayan heights of their endeavor. Upon the huge

repertoire of genuine band-music dashing French marches,

sonorous overtures, elaborate transcriptions of opera scenes

they turned their backs. The stuff they tackled came from

Tinpan. Alley, not from the Scala or the Champs de Mars,

and even for Tinpan Alley itwas dull.

Then came the invading Italians, their clarinets under

their arms and enthusiasm in their hearts. I don't know the

name of the first Italian band that appeared among us.

There is, I believe, a difference of opinion over this matter

among the Italian musicians themselves. But the first band

Italian Bands 119

to attract much attention, if I make no mistake, was one

that set up its music-stands in the shell at Willow Grove

Park, near Philadelphia, about 15 years ago. Such music as

it made was a novelty to the plain people. Gilmore had

toured the country, and Sousa had toured the country, and

other professors of the brass had followed them but at

$1.50 a seat. Here was a band that played for nothing in a

huge summer park, where anyone able to pay a few cents

car fare was welcome to listen all he cared.

The result was a palpable hit an enormous popular

success. I once saw a crowd of 15,000 at Willow Grove,

packed close about the shell and listening to this excellent

band. It played, not silly ragtime, but honest music. The

sextet from "Lucia", performed by two trumpets, two trom-

bones, a baritone and a tenor, was its pi&ce de resistance

and the sextet from "Lucia" is still the masterpiece of all

true Italian bands. It played, too, the quartet from "Rigo-

letto", the overture to "William Tell", the pilgrims' chorus

and march from "Tannhauser", the soldiers' chorus from

"Faust", the great march from "Aida", the tower scene

from "II Trovatore" (as duet, as I recall it, for trumpet and

trombone) , the wedding music from "Lohengrin", elaborate

arrangements of "Don Giovanni", 'The Barber of Seville",

"Traviata", "Carmen", "Cavalleria Rusticana" (then the

favorite of the hour), "Stradella" and "Lucrecia Borgia."

Going further, it tackled the familiar ballet suites, the time-

honored overtures. And after a while it plunged boldly

into Tschaikovskfs "1812" and other such things of fuming

and fury.

12O H. L. Mencken ON Music

There was cheapness in more than one of these transcrip-

tions. True music was often subordinated to the convenience

and glorification of the solo performer; the unspeakable

cornet was heard too much; things were played which, to

the educated ear, brought more pain than soothing: the

gentlemen of the baton, borrowing a trick from Sousa, ran

to monkey-shines and posing. But the net effect of tie

band's playing, and of the playing of the countless other

bands which followed it, was stimulating and educational,

A public made familiar with Donizetti began to sense the

banality of Kerry Mills, and from Donizetti to Verdi the

step was easy, and from Verdi upward easier still. True

musical appreciation began to appear in the land. The ap-

plause following the PUgerchor began to be louder than the

banzais following "A Georgia Campmeeting." And that was

progress.

Just how many Italian bands are now making ready for

the summer I don't know, but the number must be well

above 200. Practically every American city of 50,000 or

more inhabitants has a trolley park of the first class, and in

every trolley park there is an Italian band. Baltimore, in

summer, sometimes has three or four. They are mission-

aries of good music, for however sorry their limitations andhowever degraded the taste of the town in which they play,their striving is always upward. I have seen an Italian direc-

tor weqp tears of joy when a request came up for a "Parsifal"

arrangement that he had made with his own hand. Nightafter night he had to play the chorus with real anvils andreal sparks, but he had hope in his heart. He remembered

Wind Music 121

the time when even the anvil chorus was caviare. He looked

forward ecstatically to the time when its first notes would

bring down upon him a shower of beer bottles and bad

eggs.

Let no true friend of music scorn the Italian trumpeters

and Bb clarinetists! For all their parabolic mustachios,

their tinsel epaulettes, their anvils, their posing, their

Leonora sobbing and their waving of the Stars and Stripes,

they are yet doing a good work in this slowly civilizing Re-

public.

000000000000

Wind Music


HAVING BROUGHT the Philadelphia Orchestra up to undis-

puted first place in the concert-hall, the ever-energetic Leo-

pold Stokowski now works off some of his surplus steam by

organizing a brass band. So far it has given but two con-

certs, both in private, but soon or late, I daresay, it will be

forced out into the open. My advice to the nobility and

gentry is to book seats for the first public concert the instant

they go on sale. For here is richness, indeed! Aided by a

friendly bootlegger I heard the second private concert in

Philadelphia last Sunday. It was the middle of the week

before I was fit for my usual literary and spiritual exercises.

Brass bands, of course, are numerous, and many of them

are good ones. But this is a brass band of an entirely new


sort. Stokowski has neither tried to batter his audience into

unconsciousness with mere noise, in the manner of the

Italian conductors, nor endeavored to make his band an

imitation orchestra, in the fashion of John Philip Sousa.

Instead he has sought, within the natural limits of his

medium, to augment its flexibility, its variety, its dignity

in brief, to convert it into a first-rate musical instrument I

can only report that the results he achieves are kolossal.

Here, at last, is a brass band that can play Bach!

Butwhere are players for such super-bands to be obtained?

Apparently Stokowski found no difficulty in getting them

together. He began with the brass and wood-wind perform-

ers of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and added a few string

players who could also toot. Volunteers began to wander in

from the lesser Philadelphia orchestras. Soon there was a

band of a hundred men. More came in. At last Sunday's con-

cert there were one hundred and forty performers and all

of them played divinely!

The concert began with a Sousa march (followed by two

more as encores) and proceeded to 'The Blue Danube"

waltz, Schubert's familiar "Moment Musical" (for wood-

wind), and Sibelius' "Finlandia." That was the first part.

The second part consisted of three Wagner numbers:

the entrance of the gods into Walhalla from "Das Rhein-

gold", Wotan's Farewell and the Feuerzauber from "Die

Walkiire", and the funeral march from "Gotterdammer-

ung." Another intermission, and then the climax: the Bach

Passacaglia, hitherto arranged by Stokowski for orchestra,

and now heard, perhaps for the first time, for brass band.

Wind Music 123

All these things were scored for the band by the conductor

himself. Even the Sousa marches showed some new touches.

Sousa himself used to pky them with the aid of double-

basses and a huge battery of percussion instruments. Stokow-

ski omitted the double-basses and reduced the percussion to

its usual orchestra strength, with only one bass drum and

one set of kettle drums. The effect was superb. All the

familiar rattle was gone; instead there was a clear, bell-like

lovely sonority a magnificent swirl of pure sound. If

Sousa was not in the house he missed something. His

marches were played perfectly for the first time.

'The Blue Danube", it seemed to me, was relatively a

failure. The Strauss waltzes all need the voluptuous whine

of the strings; trumpets are too blatant and forthright for

them, and the woodwind, unsupported, is too cold. What-

ever the cause, the immortal **Donau" descended, more than

once, to mere prettiness. Its divine beeriness was gone.

Strangely enough, "Finlandia" lost almost as much. The

first part, to be sure, was magnificent and the band took

it in rapid tempo with astounding ease and precision. But

the second part, reduced to the bald woodwind, lacked

pathos. Here, too, the sentimentality of the catgut was miss-

ing. In the Schubert piece the woodwind got its revenge. It

had the floor alone and it made such loveliness as these

ears have not heard since January 16, 1920.

But all this was merely preliminary: the concert really

began with the Einzug from "Das Rheingold." Here

Stokowski achieved a double triumph: first with his scoring

and then with his conducting. The familiar music leaped


into new life at the first note: one presently began lament-

ing that Wagner had written it for orchestra, not for brass

band. There was endless variety and endless charm in the

tone-color. Exquisite combinations followed one another

enchantingly. And always there was almost perfect playing.

What a first trumpet! What a pair of flutes! And what a row

of trombones up there against the back-wall!

The "Walkiire" piece was somewhat less effective, prob-

ably because it was overlong. It was a very warm afternoon,

and even Wagner loses his potency when bald heads begin

to glitter. But in the Feuerzauber Stokowski offered some

effects of the very first caliber not imitation orchestra

effects, but undisguised band effects, yet how delicate

always, how charmingly appropriate to the music! The

pianissimo of the band toward the end became almost fairy-

like. It seemed incredible that that great gang of men could

play with so soft and exquisite a touch. The audience sat as

silent as the dead.

The Trauermarsch went off almost as well, but the

"Rheingold" scene, I think, remained the bright, shiningstar of the Wagner section. Ah, that there had been a slice

of "Tristan und Isolde", of "Die Meistersinger" or of

"Parsifal"! Maybe they will come later. For one, I'd like to

hear the band tackle the Liebestod. Would it be sacrilege to

hand that incomparable elegy over to gentlemen in bright

yellow uniforms, blowing tubas on a warm Sunday after-

noon? Answer one: you have not heard the PhiladelphiaBand. Answer two: you have heard the thing done by fat

sopranos, horribly encased in tallow and talc.

Wind Music 125

Bach ended the day and Bach at his most lordly. Per-

haps the heat was beginning to tell: perhaps the trans-

plantation of Bach to the modern orchestra, done in this case

by Stokowski himself, has had an evil effect. Whatever the

cause, it seemed to me that the Passacaglia was somewhat

muddy in the first part that the threads of the polyphony

ran together. The clear line of the fiddles was missing, and

the even clearer line of the 'cellos. The clarinets were poor

substitutes. This, obviously was against reason. Bach wrote

mainly for the organ: his actual orchestra was a band of

oboes and flutes far more than it was a band of strings. Abrass band that is, a Stokowski brass band should get

nearer to him than even a grand orchestra. I can only report

that the Passacaglia languished until near the end. Then it

rose magnificently and passed off with truly thrilling doings

by the trumpets and trombones.

As I have said, Stokowskfs conducting was quite as re-

markable as the skill he showed at writing for his band.

He had the advantage, of course, of starting off with highly

competent performers. His first trumpet, name unknown

to me, was a genuine virtuoso: he had the best trombones

I have ever heard. Superb music, too, came from his French

horns, from his flutes and from his lower woodwind, and

his drummers and cymbal-beaters showed immense skill.

But there must have been plenty of second-rate players in

the band, especially among the clarinets. If they were there,

then good conducting concealed them. The band played

almost perfectly. There was not a grunt or a bray from end

to end. . . .

TEMPO DI VALSE

From The Allied Arts, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 204-6.

First printed in the Smart Set, September, 1919, p. 40.


THE WALTZ never quite goes out of fashion; it is always just

around the comer; every now and then it returns with a

bang. And to the sore harassment and corruption, I suspect,

of chemical purity. The popular dances that come and go

are too gross to be very dangerous to civilized human beings;

they suggest drinking beer out of buckets; the most ele-

mental good taste is proof enough against them. But the

waltz! Ah, the waltz, indeedl It is sneaking, insidious, dis-

arming, lovely. It does its work, not like a college-yell or an

explosion in a munitions plant, but like the rustle of trees,

the murmur of the illimitable sea, the sweet gurgle of a

pretty girl.The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians, barbar-

ians, idiots, pigs. But there is a mystical something in

"Wiener Blut" or "Kiinstierleben" that fetches even phi-

losophers.

The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper the art

of tone turned lubritious. I venture to say that the com-

positions of Johann Strauss have lured more fair youngcreatures to complaisance than all the movie actors and

Tempo di Vcdse 127

white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire.

There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Tryit on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and

most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten

minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door nay, she

will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her hus-

band misunderstands her, and drinks too much and is going

to Cleveland, O., on business tomorrow.

WEDDING MUSIC

New Wedding March Needed

From the Baltimore Sun, June 14, 1908.

A NEW WEDDING MARCH is sorely needed. The march from

"Lohengrin" is as archaic as populism, and the Men-

delssohn march is a doddering antique. Time was when

this last composition, by reason of the harmonic hand-

springs of its first measure, fell upon the ear with a pleasant

tickle. But now such felonious modulations are common,

and first-year students at the Peabody master them before

passing on to greater difficulties of the C major triad. . . .

A marriage ceremony without "Lohengrin" would be just

as binding as those of today. The bridegroom would look

just as silly,the bride would smile just as radiantly and the

nascent mother-in-law, would find the same indescribable

afflatus of relief. And a wedding without the Mendelssohn

march would be legal and impressive, too. It might not be

so noisy as the wedding of today, but it would be just as

spectacular and just as regular.

We believe that the constant performance of these an-

cient and curdled compositions is due to the laziness of

New Wedding March Needed 129

church organists. To your average church organist each suc-

ceeding wedding is about as interesting as a new chin to a

busy barber. He is paid so much money to make music

while the bridal party marches up and down the aisle of

sighs, and being eager to annex this honorarium with the

least possible expenditure of manual labor, nervous energy

and intellectual effort, he scatters his fingers across the key-

board in the ruts that are deepest and familiar. The result is

always a mechanical and heartrending performance of the

wedding marches of MM. Wagner and Mendelssohn. . . .

We believe that the time is ripe for some miraculously in-

dustrious organist to give some other wedding march a start

A hundred and one likely compositions occur to us. There

is, for instance, the beautiful wedding music by Grieg,

and there is again the wedding march in "A Waltz Dream/'

A properly gloomy composition of the same sort is a feature

of Rubenstein's opera "Nero", and another serves as the

closing chorus of "The Mikado/' Offenbach wrote more

than 20 wedding marches and Victor Herbert has written

seven. Any one of the 345 galops, polkas and schottishes of

Johann Strauss might be changed into a passable wedding

march by slowing its tempo and fitting it with a fanfare, a

pedal point and a cadenza.

However, it is not well to put too much faith in the

present race of organists. They are not reformers; they hate

to practice, and in music, as a fine art, they take very little

interest. . . .


000000000000

Enter the Church Organist

The Wedding, A Stage Direction, from A BOOK OF BURLESQUES, pp. 56-8,

Alfred A. Knopf. (Original publishers John Lane, New York, N.Y.)

. . . THE ORGANIST is a tall, thin man of melancholy,

uraemic aspect, wearing a black slouch hat with a wide brim

and a yellow overcoat that barely reaches to his knees. A

pupil, in his youth, of a man who had once studied (briefly

and irregularly) with Charles-Marie Widor, he acquired

thereby the artistic temperament, and with it a vast fond-

ness for malt liquor. His mood this morning is acidulous

and depressed, for he spent yesterday evening in a Pilsner

ausschank with two former members of the Boston Sym-

phony Orchestra, and it was 3 a.m. before they finally

agreed that Johann Sebastian Bach, all things considered,

was a greater man than Beethoven, and so parted amicably.

Sourness is the precise sensation that wells within him. He

feels vinegary; his blood runs cold; he wishes he could im-

merse himself in bicarbonate of soda. But the call of his art

is more potent than the protest of his poisoned and quaking

liver, and so he manfully climbs the spiral stairway to his

organ-loft.

Once there, he takes off his hat and overcoat, stoops down

to blow the dust off the organ keys, throws the electrical

switch which sets the bellows going, and then proceeds to

take off his shoes. This done, he takes his seat, reaches for

the pedals with his stockinged feet, tries an experimental

32-foot CCC, and then wanders gently into a Bach toccata.

Enter the Church Organist 131

It is his limbering-up piece: he always plays it as a prelude

to a wedding job. It thus goes very smoothly and even

brilliantly, but when he comes to the end of it and tackles

the ensuing fugue he is quickly in difficulties, and after four

or five stumbling repetitions of the subject he hurriedly im-

provises a crude coda and has done. Peering down into the

church to see if his flounderings have had an audience, he

sees two old maids enter, the one very tall and thin and the

other somewhat brisk and bunchy.

They constitute the vanguard of the nuptial throng, and

as they proceed hesitatingly up the centre aisle, eager for

good seats but afraid to go too far, the organist wipes his

palms upon his trouser legs, squares his shoulders, and

plunges into the programme that he has played at all

weddings for fifteen years past It begins with Mendelssohn's

Spring Song, pianissimo. Then comes Rubenstein's Melodyin F, with a touch of forte towards the close, and then

Nevin's Oft, That We Two Were Maying, and then the

Chopin Waltz inA flat, opus 69, No. i, and then the Spring

Song again, and then a free fantasia upon The Rosary, and

then a Moszkowski mazurka, and then the Dvorak Humor-

esque (with its heart-rending cry in the middle), and then

some vague and turbulent thing (apparently the disjecta

membra of another fugue), and then Tchaikovsky's

Autumn, and then Elgar^s Sdut <FAmour, and then the

Spring Song a third time, and then an hurrah or two from

the Hallelujah Chorus, and then Chopin again, and Nevin,

and Elgar, and . . .

CATHOLIC

CHURCH MUSIC

From the Baltimore Herdd, September 30, 1905.

POPE Pius' effort to restore the early Gregorian music to the

services of the Roman Catholic Church is evidently meeting

with very gratifying success. The complete attainment of

his purpose, particularly in the United States, will take much

time, and it is unlikely that the venerable Pontiff will live to

see it, but already the effect of his pronunciamento of a

year ago is plain. Circles for the study of Gregorian chants

have been formed in nearly every large city in the country,

and in a few churches the restoration has been achieved

without the slightest opposition. That his holiness' aim is a

good one is agreed by everyone who is competent to judge;

that it will be attained is sincerely to be hoped.

The battle against decadent church music is no new one

in the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent, in 1561

wrestled with the problem. The widening knowledge of

music at that time had led to the rise of a horde of com-

posers, and most of them were hard at work writing masses

for the church. Some of these masses, if we are to believe the

Catholic Church Music 133

ancient chroniclers, were fearfully and wonderfully made.

One melody, the famous "UHomme Arm6" which the

Crusaders are said to have sung before the walls of Jeru-

salem, appealed to a great many of the contemporary

Gounods and Bachs, and they rang the changes upon it ad

nauseum* Pope Pius IV, in disgust, laid the matter before

the council, and at its suggestion appointed a board of eight

cardinals to devise a remedy.

It is believed that a majority of this board favored the

absolute prohibition of all music but the ancient plain song,

but Cardinal Borromeo, the president, did not think this

plan wise, and in the end his view prevailed. He admitted,

however, the utter worthlessness of most of the church

music of the day, and after a long discussion it was resolved

to invite Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, director of the

music at St. John of Lateran, in Rome, to essay a mass

which should avoid the defects of those then in use.

Palestrina, instead of one, submitted three masses. The

first and second were heard with approval, but the third

far surpassed them. It is related that when the cardinals

heard it they wept with delight, and that it was at once sung

before the Pope in the Sistine chapel. Palestrina called it

'TMissa Papae Marcelli", and it still holds it place today as

one of the most sublime compositions of all time.

Nevertheless, Palestrina's aid was merely temporary, and

before long trashy music began to appear once more in the

church services. At one time, in truth, the composers of

masses borrowed melodic ideas from popular secular songs,

much after the manner of the Salvation Army. Three years


ago, in Italy, there occurred something almost as grotesque,

the singing of a whole act of "II Trovatore" as part of a

church service. But now, thanks to Pope Pius, there will

be an end to this incongruous mingling of the sacred and

the profane. Unless the plans go for naught, church music

will soon take its ancient, dignified place above and apart

from all other music.

NATIONAL MUSIC

English Songs

From the Baltimore Sim, 1909.

THE GREAT CROWDS which attend the recurring national

saengerfests show how firmly the German folk-song has

established itself in the affections of the American people.

It is not Germans only who go to the saengerfests as listen-

ers, and it is not only Germans who take an active part in

them. One of the best choruses in the Saengerbund, we are

informed, is made up of Welsh coal miners living in Penn-

sylvania. In order that they may sing the beautiful German

songs these men have tediously mastered the difficult Ger-

man language. There are Irishmen in some of the choruses,

too, and in nearly all of them there are Americans whose

connection with the German soil is very remote.

All of this indicates how much may be accomplished in

music by persistent endeavor. The Germans love their na-

tional music, and by devoting their leisure to singing it they

have made all other races love it, too. The same thing, we

believe, might be done for the folk-music of any other na-

tion. If the public had frequent opportunity, for example,


to hear the ancient part songs of old England it would be

awake to their surpassing beauty.

The English madrigals deserve to be rescued from their

dusty library shelves. They reflect, for all their studied

polyphony, that bubbling joy in life which marked Tudor

England. Something of the Elizabethans' delight in spring

sunshine and the open road is in them. Like Elizabethan

lyric verse, they express the emotions of an efficient and

optimistic race. Many of them, true enough, are extremely

difficult for modern singers, but that fact only adds to their

interest.

Toward the middle of the seventeenth century the mad-

rigal began to decline in the face of the prevailing movement

toward prettiness. By 1667 we find busy Mr. Pepys re-

joicing in its passing. Pepys is what we moderns have come

to call, with graphic justic, a low-brow. An oboe cadenza,

on his own unblushing confession, moved him to crocodile

tears, but "the manner of setting words and repeating them

out of order, and that with a number of voices," made him

sick. Pepys* voice, it would appear, was vox populi, for the

madrigal retired to the libraries.

Then came the gleex one of the very few forms of musical

composition native to British soil. The glee was far less

complex than the madrigal. Like the German folk-song, it

made scarcely any demand upon vocal technique. Anyonewith a healthy glottis could help out at glee singing, and for

1Glee, in old English (gKv or gfeo) meant "music." The glee is

properly an unaccompanied vocal work for male voices, harmonicrather than contrapuntal, and not in a fixed form.

Russian Music 1 37

eighty years nearly everyone in England did so. The famous

Madrigal Society, formed in 1741 to revive the madrigal,

was soon singing glees, and in 1783 came the Glee Club.

Glees were sung at every fair and merry-making. They were

the delight of the philosopher and peasant alike. Herbert

Spencer, as a youth, found his chief recreation in glee-

singing, and so did Charles Dickens.

The rise of the music-hall song, in the 70'$ obliterated the

glee, and today it is almost forgotten. But only intelligent

effort is needed, we believe, to restore it to its old place.

The American people, whose love for music, if untutored, is

at least boundless, would hail it with joy. Here is an oppor-

tunity for our English-born choir masters. Let them turn

aside, now and then, from their anthems and give us a taste

of the beautiful music of their country. They have the

voices at hand, and they should be able to find the time.

Here in Baltimore, during the winter, there are concerts of

German song, in public or private, almost every night. Whynot one concert a month of English Song?

Russian Music

Review of My Mimed Ufe by Nflcoky Andreyevich Rimsky-Koisakoff,

translated by Judah A. Joffe, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923)- Appeared in American Mercury,

January, 1924*

THIS is the full story meticulous, humorless, full of ex-

pository passion of the Immortal Five: Balakireff, Cui,


Musorgski, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff himself. The

book is enormous, and details are piled on without the

slightest regard for the reader's time and patience. One

plows through exhaustive criticisms, often highly waspish,

of concerts given fifty and sixty years ago; one attends to

minute discussions of forgotten musical politics. Neverthe-

less, the general effect of the tome is surely not that of

boredom. It somehow holds the attention as securely as

Thayer's monumental "Beethoven" or the memoirs of

William Hickey. And no wonder, for the world that good

Nikolay Andreyevich describes is a world that must always

appear charming and more than half fabulous to western

eyes a world in which unfathomable causes constantly

produced unimaginable effects a world of occult motives,

exotic emotions and bizarre personalities in brief, the old

Russia that went down to tragic ruin in 1917. Read about

it in the memoirs of the late Count Witte, and one feels

oneself magically set down still with one's shoes shined,

still neatly shaved with a Gillette! at the court of Charle-

magne, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan. Read about

it in Rimsky-KorsakofFs book, and one gets glimpses of

Bagdad, Samarkand and points East.

The whole story of the Five, in fact, belongs to the

grotesque. Not one of them had more than the most super-

ficial grasp of the complex and highly scientific art that theycame so near to revolutionizing. Balakireff, the leader, was a

mathematician turned religious mystic and musical icono-

clast; he believed until middle age that writing a fugue was,

in some incomprehensible manner, as discreditable an act

Russian Music 1 39

as robbing a blind man. Cui was a military engineer who

died a lieutenant general. Borodin was a chemist with a

weakness for what is now called Service; he wasted half his

life spoiling charming Russian girls by turning them into

lady doctors. Musorgski was a Guards officer brought down

by drink to a job in a railway freight-station. Rimsky-

Korsakoff himself was a naval officer. All of them, he says

were as ignorant of the elements of music, as so manyunion musicians. They didn't even know the names of the

common chords. Of instrumentation they knew only what

was in Berlioz's "Trait6 d'lnstrumentation" most of it

archaic. When Rimsky-Korsakoff, on being appointed pro-

fessor of composition in St. Petersburg Conservatory

a typically Russian idea! bought a Harmonielehre and

began to experiment with canons, his fellow revolutionists

repudiated him, and to the end of his life Balakireff despised

him.

Nevertheless, these astounding ignoramuses actually

made very lovely music, and if some of it, such as Mu-

sorgski's "Boris Godunoff" had to be translated into play-

able terms afterward, it at least had enough fundamental

merit to make the translation feasible. Musorgski, in fact,

though he was the most ignorant of them all, probably wrote

the best music of them all. Until delirium tremens put an

end to him, he believed fondly that successive fourths

were just as good as successive thirds, that modulations

required no preparation, and that no such thing as a French

horn with keys existed. More, he regarded all hints to the

contrary as gross insults. Rimsky-Korsakoff, alone amongst


them, was genuinely hospitable to the orthodox enlighten-

ment He learned instrumentation by the primitive process

of buying all the orchestral and band instruments, and blow-

ing into them to find out what sort of sounds they would

make. The German Harmonielehre filled him with suspicion

that Bach, after all, must have known something, and

after a while it became a certainty. He then sat down and

wrote fifty fugues in succession! Later he got tired of po-

lyphony and devoted himself chiefly to instrumentation.

He became, next to Richard Strauss, the most skillful mas-

ter of that inordinately difficult art in Europe. Incidentally,

he and his friends taught Debussy and Schoenberg how to

get rid of the diatonic scale, and so paved the way for all

the cacophony that now delights advanced musical thinkers.

A curious tale, unfolded by Rimsky-Korsakoff with the

greatest earnestness and even indignation. A clumsy writer,

he yet writes brilliantly on occasion for example, about the

low-comedy household of the Borodins, with dinner at 11

p.m. and half a dozen strange guests always snoring on the

sofa. Is there a lesson in the chronicle, say for American

composers? I half suspect that there is. What ails these

worthy men and makes their music, in general, so dreary

is not that they are incompetent technicians, as is often

alleged, but that they are far too competent. They are, in

other words, so magnificently trained in the standard tricks,

both orthodox and heterodox, that they can no longer leap

and prance as true artists should. The stuff they write is

correct, respectable, highly learned but most of it remains

Kape^eteermusik, nay, only too often mere Augenmusik.

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Russian Music 141

Let them give hard study to this history of the five un-

tutored Slavs who wrote full-length symphonies without

ever having heard, as Rimsky-Korsakoff says, that the

seventh tends to progress downward.2Let them throw away

their harmony-books, loose their collars, and proceed to

write music.

2 The chord seventh normally progresses downward the scale

seventh (leading tone) generally resolves up.

POPULAR SONGS

OF THE PLAIN PEOPLE

A Plea for the Old Songs

From the Baltimore Sun, 1909.

WHEN THE gamboling Lambs appeared at Ford's Opera

House not long ago one of their number stepped out from

the minstrel half-circle and, lifting up a bleating tenor voice

warbled "Sweet Genevieve." The singer sang badly, even

for a tenor, and the choristers who joined him in the refrain

sang still worse, but all the same his song was rewarded with

more applause than any other number brought forth during

the entire evening. There were youngsters in that huge

audience who then heard "Sweet Genevieve" for the first

time, and there were oldsters beside them, perhaps, who

heard it for the 5ooth, with an interval of twenty years since

the 499th. One and aU, they were charmed by its homely

sentiment, its exquisite melody and its rich, simple harmony.

It was old-fashioned, but it was perfect.

There are scores of other old songs that deserve to be

rescued from the musical mortuaries. One hears them, at

rare times, when some gathering of bald heads grows

A Plea for the Old Songs 143

mushy at a class reunion, maybe, or at the fag end of a

particularly liquorish banquet. The old boys howl like wild

animals and their harmonies recall the quartets of the

vaudeville shows, but they really enjoy their own cacophony,

and at the bottom of it you will always find more than one

song with a touch of true feeling in it. There is that ancient

of the ancients, "Juanita", for instance. Say that it is banal

and over-sweet and you will be within your rights as a critic.

But say that it has no charm that, in the broad sense, it is

not beautiful and you will be saying that you have no

ears.

What has become of "In the Gloaming"? Who sings it

today? Perhaps a few doddering "lifeis" in the penitentiary,

immersed there since 1880. No one else. But is the charm

of "In the Gloaming" really dead? Not at all. The song

writers have been trying to go it one better for thirty years,

but they have not succeeded. It remains tie one best song

to sing to your Angeline on a moonlight night. Your father,

no doubt, sang it to you when you squalled. It is at once a

love song and a lullaby. Its singing measures melt the heart,

improve the digestion and calm the mind. It is bathos, but

it soothes as bathos always does.

And where is that dear old allurian, "Silver Threads

Among the Gold"? Do the song writers of today write songs

like that? Of course, they don't They are more learned

than the old-timers and have progressed far beyond the

simple, ever-reliable chords of the tonic and dominant, but

they have made no progress in the invention of luscious

melodies. When they are at their happiest they are garbling

144 ** L. Mencken ON Music

and "adapting" the ancient tunes. Thus, when we wept over

"Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie", we were paying un-

conscious tribute to a far older song, "How can it Ever

Be?" the immigrant form, it may be observed, of a Ger-

man tune of almost appalling antiquity.

The old songs had a certain unblushing sincerity about

them that the songs of today seem to lack. "Love Me, and

the World is Mine", for example, is too pretentious and

strenuous to be convincing. In singing it the vocalist gets

out of breath. No man, actually in love, ever wooed his

inamorata with such studied magnificence. The phrases are

rococo; they require the support of arduous piano thumping.

The song drips with perspiration and midnight oil. One

finds no such tortuous elaboration in "Wait Till the Clouds

Roll By." Here the words of love are as simple as the

words of Francis Bacon, and the music is as franMy senti-

mental as a waltz by Chopin. Such songs please the girls and

make for happy homes. If they were sung today, instead of

the artificial, anarchistic compositions of the ragtime kings,

there would be fewer divorces, less scandals in the news-

papers and less sorrowat the domestic hearth.

The Folk-Song

From the Baltimore Sun, 1909.

IT is A PLEASURE to welcome Dr. Max Friedlaender to Balti-

more. He is a German scholar of the highest type, and his

The Folk-Song 145

brief course of lectures in McCoy Hall upon the history of

music, with particular references to German song, is proving

to be of great interest No man has a better knowledge of

folk song than he: his critical writings upon the ancient

peasant and student songs of Germany are accepted as

authoritative by all. And he is by no means a narrow special-

ist, burrowing in this one field, for he has also written an

excellent biography of Schubert, a sound chorus manual and

other books upon music, and has edited the compositions of

Weber, Beethoven, Schumann and other German masters.

A student of the celebrated Manuel Garcia and of Philip

Spitta, he is a singer as well as a historian, a music-lover as

well as a critic.

Dr. Friedlaender, among other things, has done good

service by insisting upon the folk element in all great music.

Practically all composers of the first rank, indeed, have

grounded their music firmly upon their native folk song.

Among the Germans this is plainly evident, as well as

among the assertively national Magyars and Slavs. Bee-

thoven and Mozart made free use of the old German

melodies and dance forms, and so did Weber and the song

writers. Even in Wagner the national flavor is unmistakable.

His ideas are expressed in essentially German idioms; he is a

German in his music even before he is a musician.

The artificiality and banality which mark the bulk of

American music today here, of course, only serious music

is meant are due, in the main, to what may be called

an absurd fear of nationalism. Our composers, in a word,

are afraid to write as Americans. They try to write German


music, using German ideas and the German idiom, and the

result is inevitably an air of tedious and unsuccessful effort.

Dr. Dvorak preached against this madness, but the fashion

is still against him. To be accepted as learned, one must

laugh at him. An American phrase is sufficient to damn a

string quartet; a hint of the banjo in an orchestral com-

position is an unpardonable sacrilege.

And yet, if we are ever to produce music worth while, we

must do as the Germans have done. We must see in our

national tunes, not mere triviality, but the germs of goodmusic. We must lift up our national idioms as the Germans

and Slavs and Latins have lifted up theirs. We must realize

that, however much they may disgust the pallid conserva-

tory professor, the banjo and the hoedown are yet a part of

our national musical consciousness, and that we cannot

hope to make much progress until we take them into ac-

count An American trying to write like a German is

essentially an absurdity. But an American trying to write

as an American might conceivably thrill the world and give

it something new in an old art.

The scholastic answer to all this that, saving the planta-

tion note, there is no national note in American music; that

America has no folk song. This answer contents the pundits,

but a brief inspection proves, at bottom, it is merely one

more proof that a man may be learned in music and yethave no ears.

American Folk-Song 147

American Folk-Song

Review of The American Song-Bag, by Carl Sandburg (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Co.; 1927). Appeared in American Mercury,

January, 1924.

THE TITLE of this book is aptly chosen. Sandburg has

emptied into its pages the lyrical loot of his wanderings

about the United States, with his guitar under his arm.

There are songs in endless variety, 280 of them in all, set

down precisely as he heard them often, alas, somewhat

defectively, but always with a grand gusto for the simple

sentimentalities of the folk. What other American has

studied the folk more assidously, or to better profit? His

poems have the authentic flavor of the soil in them they

are unmistakably American as the folk-melodies of Friedrich

Schiller are unmistakably German and from the same

mine he has dredged the rich materials of his "Rootabaga

Stories" and his "Abraham Lincoln." In compiling this

"Songbag" he had the aid of a huge array of collaborators,

ranging from contrapuntists and professors of sociology to

cowboys, Lake sailors, city loafers, and roistering students

in far-flung "colleges" of the wheat country. But mainly the

thing is his own. His running commentary on the songs is

charming indeed. The volume would lose three-fourths of

its peculiar interest if there were no Sandburg in it.

Now and then, to be sure, he nods: it would be astonish-

ing, in so vast a collection, if he did not. Let him make note,

in his next edition, that "Josie," on page 84, is simply a


mauled version of "Ain't Dat a Shame!", a famous vaude-

ville song of thirty years ago, now forgotten, and that the

"Boll Weevil Song", on page 8, borrows from the same

source. "Po' Boy", on page 30, is another decayed vaude-

villian of the palmy days, and "Common Bill", on page 62,

is a German folk-song, badly reported. The I. W. W. song,

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!", on page 184, was never written

by a wobbly, it is an ancient Salvation Army hymn, with

the tune unchanged. By the same token, "The Hearse Song"

on page 444, credited to the A. E. F., is the time-tattered

"Funeral March of a Marionette."

Some of the most familiar songs, it seems to me, are set

down inaccurately. In "Turkey in the Straw", for example,

the first two measures in the refrain should be repeated,

not in the series but successively. "Dese Bones Gwine to

Rise Again", on page 470, is a sad hash, both as to words

and as to music. Can it be that Sandburg has never heard

the one authentic, chemically pure first stanza:

Some people say dat a nigger won't steal,

Dese bones shall rise again!

But I caught one in my corn-fier,

Dese bones shall rise again!

Also, what enemy of the aesthetic decencies gave him

"Ifs the Syme the Whole World Over" in\time? 1

Cer-

1 This song was one of the favorites of the Saturday Night Club.

It was sung in * or 4 time according to how many seidds had

been downed!


tainly even the tots in the kindergartens must know by now

that the tune is in common time and that it is far more

plaintive and lovely than the burlesque of it that Sandburg

prints. Again, I must protest against the slaughter of "Lydia

Pinkham" on page 210, and of "Hoosen Johnny", on page

164. Finally, I give notice that I did not write the ac-

companiment to "The Drunkard's Doom", on page 104,

as a note politely says. But the whole book would be worth

having if it contained only the priceless "I Got a Gal at the

Head of the Holler", on page 320. Here, indeed, is American

folk-song at its glorious bestl

The Music of the American Negro

From the Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 15, 1925.

THE FIRST BOOK of Negro songs ever published was brought

out by the Rev. G. D. Pike of the American Missionary

Association in 1873, and by 1892 its various editions had

run to a total of 130,000 copies. But Pike was an uplifter,

not a musician, and so his collection of the Negro spirituals,

which were then called jubilee songs, was little more than

a crude source book. AH the bold and peculiar harmonies

of the colored singer were lost. Pike had apparently intrusted

the arrangement of his specimens to some manufacturers

of Methodist hymns. Some of the best of them were thus

converted into the sort of garbage that is heard at Billy

Sunday*revivals.

2 The famous barnstorming evangelist.


It was not until 1914, when the late Henry Edward

Krehbiel, music critic of the New York Tribune, published

his "Afro-American Folk Songs", that Negro song got any

intelligent examination. Krehbiel was a German pedant of

the dullest type (though he became a violent American

patriot during the world war), but he at least had some

knowledge of music, and so his study was a valuable one. Its

defects lay in the incompleteness of his knowledge. He had

to get nine-tenths of his songs at second hand, and not

infrequently they reached him in a mutilated or, worse

still, in a clumsily embellished state.

The gaps in his work are now admirably filled by

James Weldon Johnson in 'The Book of American Negro

Spirituals." Mr. Johnson, himself a colored man, has

gathered all his materials from original sources. He grew

up in the south, he was interested in music from his earliest

years, and with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, he was

mainly responsible for the rise of what has since come to

be known as jazz. But the Johnsons are by no means mere

jazzhounds. On the contrary, they are both educated

musicians. Thus their book is one of solid dignity and value.

James Weldon Johnson discusses in a long preface the origin

and nature of the spirituals, and J. Rosamond presents scores

of them in his own arrangements.

BIRTH OF THE SPIRITUALSThe spirituals probably had a complex ancestry and are

mulatto rather than Negro. All the original slaves brought in

was a series of rhythms many of them superb, but few of


them accompanied by what Caucasians would recognize as

melody. The Africans, to be sure, had tunes, but they were

tunes of the vague, wandering sort that all other savages

affect. They lacked what white musicians call form. There

was no rhythm of structure under their rhythm of phrase,

and so they could not convey that sense of design, that feel-

ing of completion, which characterizes civilized melody.

But, as I say, the rhythms of the Negro were superb,

and so all that was needed to make good songs was their

reinforcement with melody. That melody, it is highly prob-

able, came from the campmeeting, and at some time not

earlier than the end of the eighteenth century. The whites

in the south made no effort to educate their slaves in the

arts, but they were greatly interested, after the first tours of

Francis Wesley, in saving their souls, and that salvation was

chiefly attempted, for obvious reasons, out of doors. There

arose the campmeeting and the campmeeting was a place

of sturdy and even vociferous song. The Negroes memorized

what they heard and then adapted it to their native rhythms^.

Thus the spirituals were born.

The purely Negro contribution to them good rhythm

was the more important part, and by far. To this day

Methodist hymns seem banal to musicians because they

lack variety of rhythm; nine-tenths of them bang along in

the same depressing sing-song. But the spirituals are full of

rhythms of the utmost delicacy, and when they are sung

properly not by white frauds or by high toned dephlogisti-

cated Negroes from Boston, but by black singers from the

real south they give immense pleasure to lovers of music.


Beethoven would have delighted in them, and Brahms,

had he ever heard them, would have borrowed them for

his uses as, indeed, Dvorak did after him.

HARMONY PREFERRED TO MELODYThe Negroes, having started with Methodist hymns and

improved them by joining them to decent rhythms, went a

couple of steps farther. First, they improved them as mere

melodies. That is, they displaced their obvious cadences

with cadences of greater piquancy and relieved their

monotony with bold modulations. Some of these modula-

tions, as Mr. Krehbiel demonstrated in his book, went back

to Africa. Savages knew nothing of the modes or keysthat white men use. They see nothing wrong about inserting

a glaring B flat or C sharp into the key of C major. They did

this in many of the spirituals, and sometimes the effect

was extraordinarily brilliant and thrilling.

Second, they improved the harmonies of the hymns, and

for much the same reason. That is, they wandered into

"errors" because theyknew no better and the errors turned

out to be lush and lovely. The history of civilized music

during the last two generations, indeed, has beenlargely

a history of the discovery and adoption of such errors. Whenwhite musicians began to put them into music there were

bitter protests from all the pedants, but now many of themhave become quite orthodox, and music that is bare of

them begins to seem bald and insipid. The Negroes were

using some of them all the while. They weresatisfactory

The Music of the American Negro 1 53

to the African ear long before the Caucasian ear learned to

tolerate them.

As Mr. Johnson shows the Negro is a harmonist far more

than he is a melodist. He doesn't care much for tunes; the

things that interest him are harmonies and rhythms. Let a

crowd of colored fellows begin to sing any current song,

however banal, and they will presently give it a new interest

and dignity by introducing strange and often entrancing

harmonies into it. They seem to have a natural talent for

that sort of thing. A gang of white boys, attempting song

together, will usually sing in unison, or stick to a few safe

harmonies of the barber shop variety, but darkies almost

always plunge out into deeper waters, and not infrequently,

in the midst of harsh discords, they produce effects of

extraordinary beauty.

DEBT TO AN UNKNOWN BARDThe spirituals are commonly called folk songs, and so the

notion is abroad that they sprang full blown out of the

folk that they were written, not by individuals, but by

whole groups. This is nonsense. In that sense, indeed, there

is no such thing as a folk song. Folk songs are written, like

all other songs, by individuals. All the folk have to do with

them is to choose the ones that are to survive. Sometimes,

true enough, repetition introduces changes into them, but

those changes are not important The basic song belongs to

one bard, and tohim alone.

Mr. Johnson tells of such a bard he knew as a boy in the


south, of the same surname as his own, but no relative

one "Singing" Johnson. Every southerner knows another.

These minnesingers usually traveled about, singing for their

keep. When they struck a new neighborhood they would

make songs to fit what was going on in it the advent of a

new and powerful preacher, the conversion of a notorious

sinner, a great flood or fire, the hanging of the local dare-

devil. Most of these songs died in infancy, but a few always

survived. The best of the survivors in the campmeeting

category are the spirituals that every one knows today.

Ah, that we could discover the authors of some of them!

What genius went to waste among the pre-confederate

fundamentalists! But did it go to waste? Perhaps not.

Only its possessors were lost. The black unknown who wrote

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Deep River" and "Roll,

Jordan, Roll" for I suspect one bard wrote all three

left a heritage to his country that few white men have ever

surpassed. He was one of the greatest poets we have ever

produced, and he came so near to being our greatest musi-

cian that I hesitate to look for a match for him. There would

be a monument to him in the south. He was worth a

whole herd of Timrods.

MUSIC

AND OTHER VICES

Virtuous Vandalism


A HEARING of Schumann's B flat symphony of late, other-

wise a very soothing experience, was corrupted by the

thought that music would be much the gainer if musicians

could get over their superstitious reverence for the mere text

of the musical classics. That reverence, indeed, is already

subject to certain limitations; hands have been laid, at one

time or another, upon most of the immortal oratorios, and

even the awful name of Bach has not dissuaded certain

German editors. But it still swathes the standard sym-

phonies like some vast armor of rubber and angel food,

and so imagination has to come to the aid of the flutes

and fiddles when the band plays Schumann, Mozart, and

even parts of Beethoven. One discerns, often quite clearly,

what the reverend Master was aiming at, but just as often

one fails to hear it in precise tones.


This is particularly true of Schumann, whose deficiency

in instrumental cunning has passed into proverb. And in the

B flat symphony, his first venture into the epic form, his

failures are most numerous. More than once, obviously at-

tempting to roll up tone into a moving climax, he succeeds

only in muddling his colors. I remember one place at the

moment I can't recall where it is where the strings and

the brass storm at one another in furious figures. The blast

of the brass, as the stage villains say, gets across but the

strings merely scream absurdly. The string passage suggests

the bleating of sheep in the midst of a vast bellowing of

bulls. Schumann overestimated the horsepower of fiddle

music so far up the E string or underestimated the full

kick of the trumpets. . . . Other such soft spots are well

known. Mr. Boyle's*

highly sophisticated laying on of colors,

brought into sharp contrast, was rather cruel to Schumann.

He by no means offered better music, nor did he make the

slightest pretension to any such herculean feat, but he un-

doubtedly offered a more skillful instrumentation.

Why, then, go on parroting gaucheries that Schumann

himself, were he alive today, would have long since cor-

rected? Why not call an ecumenical council, appoint a com-

mission to see to such things, and then forget the sacrilege?

As a self-elected delegate from heathendom, I nominate

Dr. Richard Strauss as chairman. When all is said and done,

Strauss probably knows more about writing for orchestra

than any other two men that ever lived, not excluding

x On this same program the premiere of George Boyle's PianoConcerto was given.

Virtuous Vandalism 1 57

Wagner. Surely no living rival, as Dr. Sunday would say,

has anything on him. If, after hearing a new composition

by Strauss, one turns to the music, one is invariably sur-

prised to find how simple it is. The performance reveals so

many purple moments, so staggering an array of luscious-

ness, that the ear is bemused into detecting scales and' O

chords that never were on land or sea. What the exploratory

eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no more than our

stout and comfortable old friend, the highly well-born

hausfrau, Mme. C Dur with a vine leaf or two of C sharp

minor or F major in her hair. The trick lies in the tone-

color in the flabbergasting magic of the orchestration. There

are moments in "Electra" when sounds come out of the

orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair, sounds so

unearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or bierfisch

and yet they are made by the same old fiddles that play

the Kaiser Quartet, and by the same old trombones that

the Valkyrie ride like witches' broomsticks, and by the same

old flutes that sob and snuffle in TitTs Serenade. And in

parts of "Feuersnot" but Roget must be rewritten by

Strauss before "Feuersnot" is described. There is one place

where the harps, taking a running start from the scrolls of

the violins, leap slambang through (or is it into?) the

firmament of heaven. Once, when I heard this passage

played at a concert, a woman sitting beside me rolled over

like a log, and had to be hauled out by the ushers.

Yes, Strauss is the boy to reorchestrate the symphonies

of Schumann, particularly the B flat, the Rhenish and the

fourth. I doubt that he could do much with Schubert, for


Schubert, though he is dead 88 years, yet remains curiously

modem. The Unfinished symphony is full of exquisite color

effects consider, for example, the rustling figure for the

strings in the first movement and as for the C major,

it is so stupendous a debauch of melodic and harmonic

beauty that one scarcely notices the colors at all. In its

slow movement mere loveliness in music probably says all

that will ever be said . . . But what of old Ludwig? Har,

har; here we begin pulling the whiskers of Baal Himself.

Nevertheless, I am vandal enough to wonder, on sad Sunday

mornings, what Strauss could do with the first movement

of the C minor. More, if Strauss ever does it and lets mehear the result just once, 111 be glad to serve six months in

jail with him . . . But in Munich, of course! And with a

daily visitor's pass for Schwager Pschoor!


MTTSICAL CRITICISM, in America confines itself chiefly to

transient reviewing, and so the number of books by Amer-ican critics is pitifully small. James Huneker has printedtwo or three good ones and W.

J. Henderson and HenryKiehbid have contributed a few punditic volumes, but

after these the tale is soon told. Philip H. Goepp's three

2 World War I.

Music After the War 1 59

volumes on the classical symphonies leave a great deal to

be said. (Compare, for example, Sir George Grove's thick

tome on Beethoven's nine.) Philip Hale's copious pedan-

tries scarcely belong to criticism at all; besides, they are

buried in the program books of the Boston Symphony Or-

chestra. As for Upton and other such fellows, they are mere

agents of Ladies9 Home Journal Kultur, and their tedious

maunderings have little more value than the literary criti-

cism of such empty sophomoralists as Hamilton Wright

Mabie and Paul Elmer More. It is astonishing that Hender-

son has not been encouraged to reprint more of his New

York Sun articles. They are not only full of novel ideas, but

extremely well written and good writing is quite as rare

in musical criticism, both at home and abroad, as good

writing in music. Henderson's books, however, have the air

of being written down to a low level of stupidity. They are

not aimed at musicians, but at singers, phonographists and

the womens' clubs. Only Huneker has reached out for the

sophisticated. He never explains the difference between a

first violin and a second violin; he doesn't rehearse the plots

of the Wagner music dramas; he always assumes that his

readers, musically speaking, at least know their three R's.

In view of this paucity of music books by Americans,

such a volume as "Music After the Great War", by Carl

Van Vechten (Schirmer), takes on a considerable im-

portance, despite its modest size and range. This Mr. Van

Vechten, I believe, labors for New York Times, and is a

prophet of the music of the future. Even Debussy begins to

bore him; he has heard nothing interesting from that quarter


for a long while. As for Germany, he finds it a desert, with

Arnold Schoenberg behind the bar of its only inviting

gasthaus. Richard Strauss? Pooh! Strauss is an exploded

torpedo, a Zeppelin brought to earth; "he has nothing more

to say." (Even the opening of the Alpine symphony, it

would appear, is mere stick-candy.) England? Go to!

Italy? Back to the barrel-organ! Where, then, is the post-

bellum tone poetry to come from? According to Mr. Van

Vechten, from Russia. It is the steppes that will produce

it or, more specifically, Prof. Igor Strawinsky, author of

'The Nightingale" and of various revolutionary ballets. In

the scores of Strawinsky, says Mr. Van Vechten, music

takes a very large leap forward. Here, at last, we are

definitely set free from melody and harmony; the thing

becomes an ineffable complex of rhythms; "all rhythms are

beaten into the ears/'

New? Of the future? I have not heard these powerful

shiverings and tremblings of M. Strawinsky, but I presumeto doubt it none the less. "The ancient Greeks," says Mr.

Van Vechten, "accorded rhythm a higher place than either

melody or harmony." Well, what of it? So did the ancient

Goths and Huns. So do the modern niggeroes and NewYorkers. The simple truth is that the accentuation of mere

rhythm is a proof, not of progress in music, but of a reversion

to barbarism. Rhythm is the earliest, the underlying ele-

ment The African savage beating his tom-tom, is content

to go no further; the American composer of fox trots is with

him. But music had scarcely any existence as an art-form

until melody came to rhythm's aid, and its fruits were little


save dullness until harmony began to support melody. To

argue that mere rhythm, unsupported by anything save tone-

color, may now take their place is to argue something so

absurd that the mere statement is a sufficient answer to it.

The rise of harmony, true enough, laid open a dangerous

field. Its exploration attracted meticulous minds; it was

rigidly mapped in hard, geometrical forms; in the end it

became almost unnavigable to the man of ideas. But no

melodramatic rejection of all harmony is needed to work a

reform. The business, indeed, is already gloriously under

way. The dullest conservatory pupil has learned how to pull

the noses of the old-time schoolmasters. No one cares a

hoot any more about the ancient laws of preparation and

resolution. (The rules grow so loose, indeed, that I maysoon be tempted to write a tone-poem myself.) But out

of this chaos new laws will inevitably arise, and though they

will not be as rigid as the old ones, they will still be coherent

and logical and intelligible. Already, in fact, gentlemen of

professorial mind (to borrow from Dr. Sunday again) are

doping them out; one needs but glance at such a book as

Ren6 Lenormand's, to see that there is a certain order

hidden in even the wildest vagaries of the moment And

when the boiling in the pot dies down, the truly great mu-

sicians will be found to be, not those who have been the

most daring, but those who have been the most discreet

and intelligent those who have most skillfully engrafted

what is good in the new upon what was sound in the old.

Such a discreet fellow is Richard Strauss. His music is

modern enough but not too much. One is thrilled by its


experiments and novelties, but at the same time one can

enjoy it as music.

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner belonged to the

same lodge. They were by no means the wildest revolu-

tionaries of their days, but they were the best musicians.

They didn't try to improve music by purging it of any of

the elements that made it music; they tried, and with suc-

cess, to give each element a new force and a new signifi-

cance. Berlioz, I dare say, knew more about the orchestra

than Wagner; he surely went further than Wagner in reach-

ing out for new orchestral effects. But nothing he ever

wrote has a fourth of the stability and value of "Tristan

und Isolde/' He was so intrigued by his tone-colors that he

forgot his music. Wagner never got so befuddled*

MORE REVIEWS

Ernest Newman and Others

Mencken's reviews of A Musical Critic's Holiday, by Ernest Newman

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1925); A Musical Motley, by Ernest

Newman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1925); String Quartette Playing,

by M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Carl Fischer); and Music of the

Past, by Wanda Landowska (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1924).

Appeared in American Mercury, December, 1925.

MR. NEWMAN calls his book a 'lioliday"; it really includes

the most valuable work that he, or any other critic writing

in English, has done in its field. For there are two things

in it that are rare and of great price, two qualities that are

as uncommon among music critics as they are among mu-

sicians: the first is sound, deep and well-ordered knowledge

of musical history, musical forms and idioms, musical anat-

omy and physiology, the second is simply common sense.

What a combination! How many music critics can show

even one of its two halves? What they deal with, ordinarily,

is merely the thing that is before them; what they have to

say of it is without background, without relevancy, without

roots. The conductor, it appears, took the first movement

of the Eroica too fast. The Hexentanz of the new genius,

Sascha Ganovski, is by Eric Satie out of "Roll, Jordan,


Roll." The new tenor sang flat, i.e. the Prohibition agent

took a bribe, the movie wench said she loved her art, the

dog had fleas. What is most music criticism? A banal and

nonsensical discussion of performers, i.e., of mountebanks,

musical scullions, nonmusicians, enemies of music. The

critic, exposed incessantly to their monkeyshines, takes on

their character. He becomes a virtuoso. He gives his show

at the expense of music.

But not Newman. In "A Musical Critic's Holiday" he

shows precisely everything that his average colleague lacks:

an immense erudition, an astonishing skill at working his

way through the tangled mazes of musical history above

all, the aforesaid sharp common sense. His business, in the

book, is to examine scientifically the phenomena of musical

development to determine the qualities that make for

genuine greatness in composers, and to find out what re-

actions they arouse in contemporary taste in brief, to dis-

cover what hardships and impediments beset the first-rate

man, and how he meets them. The result of that quest

is a great slaughter of bombast and pretense. The neglected

genius turns out to be an utter myth. He simply does not

exist. There is no record in musical history of a man of the

first talent who languished for recognition, or even lacked

fame. 'There has never yet been a composer so greatly in

advance of his time that only an initiate here and there . . .

could understand him." But what of the Schonbergs, the

Stravinskys, the Ornsteins, the Saties? Such fowl have al-

ways existed, world without end and every generation

has promptly forgotten those of the generation before.

Ernest Newman and Others 165

Meanwhile, the Mozarts, the Beethovens, the Brahmses

and the Wagners have gone marching on, honored while

they lived, and remembered after they died. What have the

tin-pot revolutionists left? Many a novelty, many an idea

and some of them good. But they survive today, woven into

the fabric of music, not in the compositions of revolu-

tionists, but in those of the men they stormed against

in brief, the genuinely first-rate composers of their time.

Mr. Newman's book is a work of great originality and

high value. It sweeps away whole dumps of critical garbage.

In "Musical Motley" he is less profound, but unfailingly

amusing. "The Amateur Composer", "Bach in the Opera

House", "Nonsense Music", "The Music of Death",

"Brahms and the Waltz" these are some of the things he

discusses, always with something new to say, and always

charmingly. There is charm, too, in Mme. Landowska's

excellent volume upon eighteenth century music charm

and sound knowledge, for what she knows about the per-

formance of it is deep and singular. More than charm is in

Mrs. Norton's book on string quartette playing. The curious

thing is that the volume was not written long ago. Are

there any greater delights on this earth than those offered

by chamber music? I don't mean merely listening to it; I

mean playing it. Yet the literature for the guidance of

performers is astonishingly meager, and the little that exists

is of small value. Mrs. Norton indulges in no hollow rhap-

sodies. Instead she discusses the practical difficulties that

quartette players confront, and shows how they are to be

surmounted, with innumerable examples. Her experience


has been wide, and she has got a great deal out of it beside

mere virtuosity.

The Poet and the Scientist

Mencken's reviews of Music: A Science and an Art, by John Redfield

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1928) and Anthett and the Treatise on

Harmony, by Ezra Pound (Chicago: Pascal Coviti; 1927). Appeared in

American Mercury, August, 1928.

MR. POUND writes as a poet who is greatly interested in

music, but has little technical knowledge of it; Mr. Redfield

writes as a physicist who knows vastly more about it than

most professional musicians. The difference in equipmentshows itself in a difference of approach and method. Mr.

Pound is somewhat rhetorical, and his discoveries are usu-

ally less astonishing than he plainly thinks they are; Mr.

Redfield writes in an austerely scientific manner, but has

more that is novel and apposite to say about the tone art

than has been said by any other writer upon the subject

formany years.

By this comparison, I hasten to add, I do not attempt to

run down the effervescent Pound. He does his damndest,and it is surely not to be sniffed at. For a poet, and expecially

an American poet, to have acquaintance with music at all

is surely sufficiently unusual: perhaps it would not be goingtoo far to put the prodigy beside Lindbergh's flight. Mostof our native minnesingers, like most of our native artists

in prose, seem to labor under the delusion that jazz is


music, and some of them even appear to think that it is

better than the music written by Beethoven. Pound nurses

no such folly: he is well aware that jazz, with its relentless

thumping in four-four time, is no more, at best, than an

expanded drum part, with an accompaniment for wind-

machines, most of them defective tonally. But though he

thus rejects the brutal cacophony of Broadway, he embraces

the almost equally brutal cacophony of George Antheil,

and therein he proves, perhaps, that poets are at their best

when they are writing poetry, and not when they are specu-

lating about the other (and greater) fine arts.

Pound's chief discovery, in his "Treatise on Harmony",

is that "any chord may be followed by any other, provided

the right time interval be placed between them/' This is

the sort of dogma that seems revolutionary and portentous,

but is in reality quite hollow. That the succession of chords

is conditioned to some degree by the length of the har-

monized notes has been known since the day of the first

theorists. Every composer of any taste or skill takes the

fact into consideration. Nor is it news that any chord mayfollow any other chord, given the proper dynamic and other

conditions. Modulations more daring than any ever im-

agined by Stravinsky have been made by boozy church

organists for centuries, and without inflicting any appreci-

able damage upon either pastor or congregation. The rules

in the books were made to be broken, and perhaps the best

way to estimate the true amperage of a composer next, of

course, to asking him what he thinks of Johann Strauss is

to observe the deftness and plausibility with which he

i68 H. L. Mencken ON Music

breaks them. Nor is there any visible sense in Pound's

notion that his hero, Antheil, has contributed something

to music by talking idiotically of "silences twenty minutes

long, in the form." This is pure bilge. A form with a hole

in it that large would simply be no form at all; as well talk

of a circle with a broken perimeter.

But though Pound thus fails as a musical revolutionist,

and Anthefl with him, it must be said for both of them

that they are amusing fellows, and that what they have

to say on more conventional levels is frequently pungent

and judicious. Part of the book consists of a series of pro-

nunciamentos by Pound, with comments by Antheil.

Pound is usually more interesting than Anthefl, for laymen

always write about music with more bounce and address

than musicians, but even Anthefl sometimes verges upon

saying something. For example, when he allows that "one

must never be suddenly jarred in either a restaurant or a

concert hall," for "one eats food in the first and digests it

in the second." Thus, he concludes, "the average concert

and *bettef restaurant are identical/' Again, there is his

dictum that "anyone with a capacity for grinning has a

'pleasing stage personality!'" Pound himself has some

incisive (if somewhat obvious) things to say about the

deficiencies of the piano, and the horrible effects that issue

out of playing it with the orchestra. On page 111 he writes

on form so sensibly that one suspects he must have for-

gotten, transiently, his nonsense about Anthefl's "silences

twenty minutes long." And he has sound and penetrating

things to say about Mozart, Bach, Debussy, Chopin and


many another. His judgment upon Scriabin's grandiose

"Po&me d'Extase" deserves wide circulation. Scriabin, he

says, would have been 'Tdnder to his audience if he had

labeled this poem 'Satire Upon an Old Gentleman', or

possibly 'Confessions of an Old Gentleman in Trouble/"

Mr. Redfield's book covers a wider range in fact, almost

the whole range of music. He was formerly a lecturer on

the physics of music at Columbia, and has contributed

a number of articles to The American Mercury. Here he

discusses the nature of tone, the structure of the scale, the

underlying laws of harmony, the aesthetic content of music,

the methods of the piano-tuner, and the design of the

various instruments of the orchestra. His pages are packedwith novel ideas, and he maintains most of them with

great plausibility. A great deal of the murkiness that one

finds in the average Harmonielehre, he says, is due to the

fact that C is wrongfully assumed to be the fundamental

of the C major scale. The real fundamental, he believes, is

F, and so on through the scales. In other words, we should

abandon the Ionian mode and adopt the Lydian. Even so,

he is not satisfied with our common scale, but proposes a

new one of his own. His argument for this scale, is too

technical to be summarized here, but it must be said for

it that it is very impressive.

Mr. Redfield has much to say about the instruments of

the orchestra, and proposes many changes in their design

and combinations. He believes that the wood-wind has

been unduly subordinated, and that there should be four

or five times as many flutes as there are now. The theory


that the violin, as it stands, is perfect does not convince

him. Its physics deserves far more study than it has ever

got; to this day no one seems to know the precise path of

the vibrations of the bridge. He believes that the difference

in quality and volume between the open and stopped tones

could and should be remedied "a problem for an engineer,

not for a musician." He derides the common belief that

the varnish of a violin has anything to do with determining

its tone. If that were true, he says violin-makers would

varnish the insides as well as the outsides of their instru-

ments. Their hostility to change he ascribes to the fact

that practically all of them are also dealers in old instru-

ments, a very profitable business. If they produced better

violins, it would destroy the high value of their present

stocks.

The piano also comes in for an overhauling. Its chief

defect today, aside from its bad tuning, which it shares

with all other keyed instruments, lies in the fact that it

cannot produce sustained tones. Its staccato is incompa-

rable, but its legato issilly. Mr. Redfidd sees no reason

why this weakness should not be remedied. A simple enoughelectrical device might be used to sustain the tone, and even

to increase or diminish it at will. As for the organ, it seems

to be passing beyond the capacities of one performer. Henow has two or three keyboards to manage, a row of pedals,

and a huge battery of stops. It is no wonder that so manyorganists take to drink and die in the gutter. Mr. Redfield

makes the plausible suggestion that it would be far better

to have two performers to each organ, and suggests that


they might be helped furthermore by various mechanical

devices. As things stand, they frequently face such technical

difficulties that their only recourse is to pull out all the stops

and drown their blunders in a torrent of sound. If they had

help it might be possible to increase the number of keys

from twelve in an octave to thirty-five, and so get rid of the

tempered scale. That would not only improve the organ it-

self, it would also improve choir singing, and so advance

the Kingdom of God.

Mr. Redfield suggests many new instruments a flute

playing down to C in the bass clef, a couple of new fiddles

between the violin and the 'cello, a contrabass clarinet in

E flat, a new and lower trombone with a large helicon bell,

a set of timpani capable of sounding the whole chromatic

scale, and soprano and bass snare drums.1 He believes that

there are excellent possibilities in the xylophone, and the

orchestral bells and marimba. All of them, he says, are much

superior to "the dulcimer at the time Cristofori converted

it into a piano by giving it a keyboard." The orchestral

bells, in particular, attract him. He proposes that their solid

bars be abandoned for pipes of the sort used in clocks and

dinner-chimes, that resonator tubes and vibrator disks be

provided, that piano hammers and dampers be added, and

that a keyboard top the whole. "All the literature of the

piano would be immediately available to be played upon

it," and the result would be "the most ravishing sounds ever

heard from a keyboard." Moreover, the new instrument

1High and low pitch snare drums, the contrabass clarinet and

chromatic timpani, etc. are common today.


would probably cost a great deal less than a piano and it

would always be in tune.

I give a few samples from an extraordinarily thoughtful

and interesting book. Mr. Redfield has more to say than

any of the usual musical theorists. His ideas are supported

by a great body of exact knowledge, and he writes with

great clarity and charm.

31Cfl **

If

^co

II

OCCUPATIONAL

HAZARD

Music as a Trade

From the Smart Set, June, 1922, p. 46. Included in A MENCKEN

CHRESTOMATHY, 1949, pp. 547-8.

Music is enormously handicapped as an art by the fact that

its technique is so frightfully difficult I do not refer, of

course, to the technique of the musical executant, but to

that of the composer. Any literate man can master the

technique of poetry or the novel in ten days, and that of

the drama despite all the solemn hocus-pocus of the pro-

fessors who presume to teach it in three weeks, but not

even the greatest genius could do a sound fugue without

long and painful preparation. To write even a string quartet

is not merely an act of creation, like writing a sonnet; it is

also an act of applied science, like cutting out a set of tonsils.

I know of no other art that demands so elaborate a pro-

fessional training. The technique of painting has its dif-

ficulties, particularly in the direction of drawing, but a hun-

dred men master them for one who masters counterpoint.


So with sculpture. Perhaps the art which comes nearest to

music in technical difficulties is architecture that is, mod-

ern architecture. As the Greeks practiced it, it was relatively

simple, for they used simple materials and avoided all deli-

cate problems of stress and strain; and they were thus able

to keep their whole attention upon pure design. But the

modern architect, with his complex mathematical and

mechanical problems, must be an engineer before he is an

artist, and the sort of engineering that he must master

bristles with technical snares and conundrums. The serious

musician is an even worse case. Before he may write at all

he must take in and coordinate a body of technical knowl-

edge that is about as great as the outfit of an astronomer.

I say that all this constitutes a handicap on the art of

music. What I mean is that it snares off many men who

have charming musical ideas and would make good com-

posers, but who have no natural talent or taste for the

technical groundwork. For one Schubert who overcomes

the handicap by sheer genius there must be dozens who are

repelled and discouraged. There is another, and perhaps

even worse disadvantage. The potential Schuberts flee in

alarm, but the Professor Jadassohns march in bravely. That

is to say, music is hard for musicians, but easy for pedants

and quacks. Its constant invasion by tinpot revolutionists

is the result. It offers an inviting playground to the jackass

whose delight it is to astonish the bourgeoisie with insane

feats of virtuosity.

The Reward of the Artist 175

The Reward of the Artist

From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY (P. Goodman; 1918).

A MAN LABORS and fumes for a whole year to write a sym-

phony in G minor. He puts enormous diligence into it, and

much talent, and maybe no little downright genius. It draws

his blood and wrings his soul. He dies in it that he maylive again. Nevertheless, its final value, in the open market

of the world, is a great deal less than that of a fur overcoat,

or a handful of authentic hair from the whiskers of HenryWadsworth Longfellow.

LITTLE

CONCERT-HALLS

From die American Mercury, March 28, 1930; under pseudonym of

Atwood C. Bellamy.

WHAT THE Little Theaters have done for the drama in

America is known to everyone. If there is any hospitality

to intelligence on Broadway today it is mainly due to them.

Without them the commercial managers would still be in

the Erknger-Frohman-Belasco stage of evolution, and the

best plays of the day would be such things as '^Zaza" and

'The Lion and the Mouse/' These Little Theaters, at the

start, had hard sledding, both in New York and in the

provinces. All the head men of the theater were against

them, and so were nearly all the dramatic critics. Theyfound it difficult to obtain suitable plays;

*

they found it

even more difficult to discover competent performers; they

were made fun of on every hand. But now all that is

changed. They have an enormous repertory of plays to

1 In 1909 Mencken wrote a one-act satire on a musical subject,'The Artist," which was performed in Little Theaters in several

cities. It was subsequently translated into French, Danish andGerman.

Little Concert-Hdls 177

choose from, and they have trained their own actors. And

everyone speaks well of them, including even the more

enlightened of the commercial managers.

I rise to suggest that what has thus worked so well with

the drama might work just as well with music. That is to

say, I propose that Little Concert-Halls be set up every-

where not only in New York, but in all the cities and

towns of the land. And I propose that, like the Little Thea-

ters, they be devoted to putting on what is not now done

commercially, and that they be directed and operated, not

by the professionals who now burden American music, but

by amateurs. I propose that these amateurs not only ran

them, but also play in them, just as the amateurs of two

decades ago played in the Little Theaters. And I propose,

finally, that they be run, not for profit, but for the simple

love of music.

I can see no reason why the scheme should not be work-

able. To put on opera takes millions and to put on sym-

phony concerts takes almost as much, but to put on a string

quartette takes next to nothing. Specifically, it takes a plat-

form about as big as an ordinary dining-room, and space

for fifty or sixty spectators that is all. Throw two parlors

into one, and you have it Clean out the loft above what

was once a horse-stable, and you have it again. Rent an old

store in a side street, and you have it once more.

The chamber music that is now heard in the United

States is usually heard under the worst possible conditions.

There are very few public halls suitable for it, and so it is

forced into halls that are not suitable for it. I myself


have heard the Flonzaley Quartette try to play Haydn's

E flat, opus 20, in a hall in which Sousa's band had played

the week before. And another time I heard Ysaye and two

others tackle the first Brahms trio in a hall so wide and long

and high that, sitting in the middle of it, I felt like an

electron lost in a molecule. It goes without saying that the

acoustics of such bams are not adapted to quartette playing.

Yet most of the quartette playing that goes on in America

goes on in them.

Chamber music is precisely what its name implies: it

is music intended to be played in ordinary rooms not

small ones, perhaps, but still ordinary rooms. It never

sounds so well as when one is dose to it. Probably the ideal

place, when the composition is a quartette, is directly in

the middle of the four players. Retreat forty feet, and at

once the thing begins to be thin and wheezy. Go back sixty

feet, and one may well leave the place altogether. Thechamber music classics were all written for small halls and

small audiences. When Beethoven or Mozart or Schubert

wanted to make a lot of noise and fill a big hall, he turned

to the full orchestra.

My first point is that a hall exacfly suitable for chambermusic up to and including such things as Schubert's andMendelssohn's octettes may be obtained in any Americantown for no more rent a month than it takes to keep a car,

and that furnishing it would cost scarcely more than a goodsuit of clothes. My second point is that, if amateurs becounted in, there are players enough to man it almost every-whereand audiences ready to listen to them. That so

Little Concert-Halls 179

little chamber music is heard in America today is not the

fault of the audiences. It is the fault of the system that

converts a string quartette into a sort of travelling circus,

and puts it to playing in halls big enough for horse-shows,

that the rapacity of whole packs of managers, booking

agents, local managers, house managers, press-agents and

other such hangers-on may be satisfied.

The Little Concert-Halls that I have in mind would bear

no such burden. It would not be open every night, and it

would not be dependent on the box-office. Its heart and soul

would be the performers. They would use it for rehearsals,

and, when they got good enough, they would ask the public

in to listen. There would be seats for fifty, a hundred, maybetwo hundred no more. And the next night some other

group would play, maybe with some of the same performers

appearing again, and maybe with a whole new outfit. One

night string quartettes. The next night trios or a sonata

evening. The next week quintettes (say Brahms' or Mo-

zart's for clarinet and strings, and Schubert's "Forellen"),

or maybe a pair of sextettes (say Dvofdk's and Raff's!),

or a mixture of big things and little. Once or twice a year a

whole evening for the Schubert octette, or a programme of

pieces for salon orchestra.

I see no reason why it should be difficult, in any sizeable

American town, to raise the money for such an enterprise.

There is no need to have a hall on main street, with electric

lights outside and a doorman dressed like a field marshal.

There is no need to have a paid manager or to do any ad-

vertising. There is even no need to pay the performers, save


maybe now and then, when a bassoon or a clarinet is called

for, and no amateur who can play it is to be found. The

Little Theaters all started on shoe-strings. They went up

alleys and kept to themselves. The fun was for the per-

formers and their friends, not for people wandering around

idly, vacillating between this and that movie show. But a

public soon found them out, and presently many of them

were making their expenses, and not a few were even ac-

cumulating capital. Such a hall as I have in mind may be

rented, even in the big cities, for no more than $1,000 a

year. Add $500 for light, heat, programmes, music, and

other current expenses, and $500 for the unforeseen, and

the total is still within the means of any average group of

twenty or thirty music-lovers. Say that twenty performances

are given during the season, and that an average of a hun-

dred tickets is sold for each, at $1 a piece; the cost is now

precisely nothing. But even if there is a deficit, what true

amateur, considering all the fun he has had, will object to

paying his share of it?

In this department of finance, the experience of the

Littie Theaters ought to be useful. I don't know how they

managed it, but manage it they did. The death-rate, of

course, was very high among them, but some of them

always survived, and whenever one of them fell out another

was ready to take its place. Their work completely changedthe attitude of the American public toward the drama.

Today it would roar with laughter over things that it gapedat in all solemnity twenty years ago. And today it is payingto see plays that it once ignorantiy snickered at

Little Concert-Halls 181

The same might be 4one for music, and especially for

chamber music, which is the loveliest kind there is. No great

capital is needed, and no tedious propaganda. The materials

are everywhere, and also, I believe, the interest. All that

is necessary is to give it a chance to show itself. I'd like to

see a Little Concert-Hall in every town in the United States,

and in the big cities scores of them. And some day, I be-

lieve Fll see them.

"LIGHT" MOTIFS

On Tenors

From the Baltimore Sun, November 10, 1907.

LIKE IHE red-haired girl and the mother-in-law, the church

choir tenor is a butt for every cretinous punster and village

humorist His low notes are declared to be off the key; his

skyscrapers are compared to the unearthly shrieks of a dis-

sipated oboe. He is held up to the public scorn and odium.

And now, to add to his woes, one of these silly Western

college professors springs into the limelight with the "dis-

covery" that the tenor voice is not a voice at all, but a dis-

ease. When the healthy male throat makes noises, says the

professor, those noises are of baritone or bass variety. The

man who sings tenor needs medicine. His vocal chords are

loose.

We have no faiih whatever in this alleged "discovery." It

has an air of improbability and absurdity. It stands opposedto known and admitted facts. That the act of singing

tenor is a tort, or outrage, we do not presume to deny, but

moral turpitude, as everyone knows, differs vastly from

psychological abnormality. A tort differs from a lesion.

Mysteries of the Tone-Art 183

A crime is no brother to a broken leg. And so we hold that

the average tenor needs, not medicine, but religion not

a trained nurse, but a turnkey.

The tenor voice differs as much from all other human

voices as the French horn differs from a piccolo. It has

more wolf tones, and it is, in the true sense, a transposing

instrument. The ordinary scale handicaps and embarrasses

it. A scale made up entirely of diminished sevenths, if such

a thing were possible, would fit it better. It is a voice in-

effable and unearthly. In its upper register (particularly

when it appears with other voices, in an a capella chorus)

it grabs the heart strings and tears them out by the roots.

We admit, of course, that there are many robust tenors

whose singing is very pleasant and frequently musical. One

such is M. Enrico Caruso. And there are others too. But

the average amateur tenor can urge no such excuse for him-

self. His singing is entirely and utterly indefensible. His

high B flat is wedged somewhere between A natural and

G sharp. His grimaces are horrific. His breathing is as

vociferously obvious as the cough of a gas engine.

Lethim be anathema!

Mysteries of the Tone-Art

From the Baltimore Evening Sun, July i, 1910.

. . , To PLAY THE 'CELLO one must be sound in wind and

limb, and the 'cello, on its part, pays back, with interest,


the muscular energy expended in performing upon it. Re-

move the vestments of a veteran 'cello player and you will

find muscles as round and as hard as mock oranges. The

extensor carpi radidis longor, in the upper right arm, stands

out like an Ionic pillar in front of a colonial home. And in

the lower arm the -flexor sublimis digitorum has the thick-

ness of a piano leg and the unyielding texture of a clarinet-

ist's intellect.

Some psychophysiologist should give earnest study to the

effects of the various orchestral instruments upon the per-

sons affecting them. Why is it, for example, that most oboe

players are men of violent temper? It has been found in

Germany that 8 per cent of all crimes of violence committed

by musicians are to be laid to oboe players, though theyconstitute less than one per cent of the whole body of per-

formers. A recent census of Bavaria showed that of the

359 oboe players in that Kingdom, 43 were anarchists and

161 were militant socialists. It is generally believed by other

musicians that the plaintive, unearthly note of the oboe

is to bkme for the eccentricities of its performers. Theother men of the orchestra commonly object to sitting next

to the oboes. They say that the noise disturbs them and

makes them play out of tune.

It would also be interesting to find out why all performers

upon the viola are pessimists and all double bass playerssuch heavy drinkers. Alcohol seems to have no effect what-

ever upon an experienced double bass player. There is oneman in the Gewandhaus orchestra at Leipzig whose daily

potation consists of 18 liters of Munich dunkle, almost

Masters of Tone 185

enough to paralyze a whole lodge of Elks. And yet he is

always sober, alert and accurate in his playing. He is, indeed,

the only double bass player in all Germany who can get

through the scherzo of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with-

out once stopping to remove the rosin dust from his eyes.

00000000

Masters of Tone

From the Smart Set, May, 1912, p. 158; in A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY,

1949, P- 550-

WAGNER The rape of the Sabines ... a kommers in

Olympus.

Beethoven The glory that was Greece . . . the gran-

deur that was Rome ... a laugh.

Haydn A seidel on the table ... a girl on your knee

. . . another and different girl in your heart

Chopin Two embalmers at work upon a minor poet

... the scent of tuberoses . . . Autumn rain.

Richard Strauss Old HomeWeek in Gomorrah.

Johann Strauss Forty couples dancing . . . one byone they slip from the hall . . . sounds of kisses ... the

lights go out.

Puccini Silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

Debussy A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown

one.

Bachr-Genesis I, I.

MORALS

AND MUSIC

Music and Sin

From PREJUDICES, FIFTH SERIES, 1926, pp. 293-6.

. . . THE DELUSION seems to persist that jazz is highly

aphrodisiacal. I never encounter a sermon on the subject

without finding it full of dark warnings to parents, urging

them to keep their nubile daughters out of the jazz palaces

on the ground that the voluptuous music will inflame their

passions and so make them easy prey to bond salesmen

musicians and other such carnal fellows. All this seems to

me to be nonsense. Jazz, in point of fact, is not voluptuousat all. Its monotonous rhythms and puerile tunes make it a

sedative rather than a stimulant. If it is an aphrodisiac, then

the sound of riveting is also aphrodisiac. What fetches the

flappers who come to grief in the jazz parlors is not the

music at all, but the alcohol. Drinking it out of flasks in

the washrooms, they fail to keep the dose in harmony with

their natural resistance, and so they lose control of their

faculties, and what follows is lamentable. Jazz, which came

Music and Sin 187

in with Prohibition, gets the blame that belongs to its part-

ner. In the old days, when it was uncommon for refined

women to get drunk at dances, it would have been quite

harmless. To-day even Chopin's funeral march would be

dangerous.

The truth is that jazz is probably the least voluptuous

variety of music commonly heard in Christendom. There

are plenty of Methodist hymns that are ten times as aphro-

disiacal, and the fact is proved by the scandals that follow

every camp-meeting. In most parts of the United States,

indeed, the Methodists have begun to abandon camp-

meetings as subversive of morality. Where they still flourish

it is not unusual for even the rev. clergy to be taken in

Byzantine practices. But so-called good music is yet worse

than the Methodist hymns. Has the world so soon for-

gotten James Huneker's story of the prudent opera mammawho refused to let her daughter sing Isolde, on the ground

that no woman could ever get through the second act with-

out forgetting God? That second act, even so, is much over-

estimated. There are piano pieces of Chopin that are a

hundred times worse; if the Comstocks really had any sense,

they would forbid their performance. And what of the late

Puccini? If "La Boh&ne" is not an aphrodisiac, then what

is? Yet it is sung publicly all over the world. Only in

Atlanta, Ca., is there a law against it, and even that law was

probably inspired by the fact that it was written by a Catho-

lic and not by the fact that it has brought hundreds of

thousands of Christianwomen to the abyss.

Old Ludwig himself was not without guilt. His "Egmonf*

i88 H. L. Mencken ON Music

overture is a gross and undisguised appeal to the medulla

oblongata. And what of his symphonies and quartettes?

The last movement of his Eroica is not only voluptuous to

the last degree; it is also Bolshevistic. Try to play it with

your eyes on a portrait of Dr. Calvin Coolidge. You will

find the thing as impossible as eating ice cream on roast

beef. At the time of its first performance in Vienna the

moral sense of the community was so greatly outraged that

Beethoven had to get out of town for a while. I pass over

Wagner, whose 'Tristan und Isolde" was probably his

most decorous work, despite Huneker think of "Parsifal"!

and come to Richard Strauss! Here I need offer no argu-

ment: his "Salome" and "Elektra" have been prohibited

by the police, at one time or another, in nearly every coun-

try in the world. I believe "Der Rosenkavalier" is still

worse, though the police leave it unmolested. Compare its

first act to the most libidinous jazz ever heard of on Broad-

way. It is like comparing vodka to ginger-pop. No womanwho hears it is ever the same again. She may remain

within the law, but her thoughts are wayward henceforth.

Into her ear the sirens have poured their abominable song.

She has been beset by witches. There is a sinister glitter in

her eye.

The Music-Lover

The Music-Lover

From The Allied Arts, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 194-6.

First printed in the Smart Set, December, 1919, pp. 70-1.

OF ALL FORMS of the uplift, perhaps the most futile is that

which addresses itself to educating the proletariat in music.

The theory behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating

passion, and that if the great masses of the plain people

could only be inoculated with it they would cease to herd

into the moving-picture parlors, or to listen to demagogues,

or to beat their wives and children. The defect in this

theory lies in the fact that such a taste, granting it to be

elevating which, pointing to professional musicians, I

certainly deny simply cannot be implanted. Either it is

born in a man or it is not born in him. If it is, then he will

get gratification from it at whatever cost he will hear mu-

sic if Hell freezes over. But if it isn't, then no amount of

education will ever change him he will remain indifferent

until the last sad scene on the gallows.

No child who has this congenital taste ever has to

be urged or tempted or taught to love music. It takes to

tone inevitably and irresistibly; nothing can restrain it.

What is more, it always tries to make music, for the delight

in sounds is invariably accompanied by a great desire to

produce them. All genuine music-lovers try to make music.

They may do it badly, and even absurdly, but nevertheless

they do it. Any man who pretends to cherish the tone-art

and yet has never learned the scale of C major any and


every such man is a fraud. The opera-houses of the world are

crowded with such liars. You will even find hundreds of

them in the concert-halls, though here the suffering they

have to undergo to keep up their pretense is almost too

much for them to bear. Many of them, true enough, deceive

themselves. They are honest in the sense that they credit

theirown buncombe. But it is buncombe none the less.

In the United States the number of genuine music-lovers

is probably very low. There are whole States, e.g., Alabama,

Arkansas and Idaho, in which it would be difficult to muster

a hundred. In New York, I venture, not more than one per-

son in every thousand of the population deserves to be

counted. The rest are, to all intents and purposes, tone deaf.

They cannot only sit through the infernal din made by the

current jazz-bands; they actually like it. This is precisely as

if they preferred the works of the Duchess to those of

Thomas Hardy, or the paintings of the men who makecovers for the magazines to those of El Greco. Such per-

sons inhabit the sewers of the bozart. No conceivable edu-

cation could rid them of their native infirmity. They are

born incurable.

POTPOURRI

THE HAPSBURGS seem to be quite down and out The arch-

dukes of the house, once so steadily in the newspapers, are

now heard of no longer, and the Emperor Karl appears to be

a jackass almost comparable to an American Congressman.

But what a family in the past! To one member Haydn dedi-

cated the Kaiser quartette, to another Beethoven dedicated

the Erzherzog trio, and to a third old Johann Strauss dedi-

cated the Kaiser waltz. Match that record in all human

history. (Smart Set, November, 1921, p. 36; A Mencken

Chrestomathy, p. 219: Undying Glories)

... If it were possible to produce a Chopin with a few

doses of tubercle bddtti, even at the cost of killing him at

thirty-nine, it would surely be worth while. And if a tech-

nique is ever worked out for producing a Beethoven, or

even making measurably more likely the production of a

Beethoven, with any other pathogenic organisms, then cer-

tainly only idiots will complain if they kill him at fifty-seven.

(Smart Set, December, 1919, pp. 66-7; A Mencken Chres-

tomathy, p. 369: Pathological Note)

A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less

competent than he was before to steer a battleship down

Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of


trust, or to conduct Bach's B minor Mass, but he is im-

mensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, or to

admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach's B minor Mass.

(American Mercury, February, 1924, pp. 201-3; Prejudices,

Fourth Series, 1924, pp. 173-9; A Mencken Chrestomathy,

pp. 388-9: Portrait of an Ideal World)

Beethoven suffered more during the composition of the

Fifth symphony than aH the judges on the benches of the

world have suffered jointly since the time of Pontius Pilate.

(New York Evening Mail, November 16, 1917, Prejudices,

Second Series, 1920, pp. 1 55-71;AMencken Chrestomathy,

p. 446: The Divine Afflatus)

There is no more confining work known to man than

instrumentation. The composer who has spent a day at it is

invariably nervous and ill. For hours his body is bent over

his music-paper, the while his pen engrosses little dots uponthin lines. I have known composers, after a week or so of

such labor, to come down with auto-intoxication in its most

virulent forms. Perhaps the notorious ill health of Beetho-

ven, and the mental breakdowns of Schumann, Tschai-

kowsky and Hugo Wolf had their origin in this direction.

(New York Evening Mail, November 16, 1917; Prejudices,

Second Series, 1920, pp. 155-71;A Mencken Chrestomathy,

p. 447: The Divine Afflatus)

. . . Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more

or less lascivious music a slap on the back in waltz time

a grand release of longings and repressions to the tune of

flutes, harps, sackbuts, psalteries and the usual strings.

(Smart Set, June, 1920, pp. 138-43; Prejudices, Third Se-

Potpourri 193

ries, 1922, pp. 150-70; A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 449:

The Poet and His Art)

Poetry that is all music is obviously relatively rare, for

only a poet who is also a natural musician can write it, and

natural musicians are much rarer in the world than poets.

(Smart Set, June, 1920, pp. 138-43; Prejudices, Third

Series, 1922, pp. 1 50-70; A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 451 :

The Poet and His Art)

I have heard each of the first eight symphonies of Beetho-

ven more than fifty times, and most of Mozart's, Haydn's,

Schubert's and Schumann's quite as often. Yet if Beetho-

ven's C minor were announced for performance tonight, I'd

surely go to hear it. More, I'd enjoy every instant of it. Even

second-rate music has this lasting quality. Some time ago

I heard Johann Strauss' waltz, "Geschichten aus dem

Wiener Wald," for the first time in a long while. I knew it

very well in my goatish days, every note of it was familiar.

Nevertheless, it gave me immense delight. Imagine a man

getting delight out of a painting of corresponding caliber

a painting already so familiar to him that he could repro-

duce it from memory. (Smart Set, January, 1921, pp. 39-40;

Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924, pp. 240-8; A Mencken

Chrestomathy, p. 552: Hand-Painted Oil Paintings)

As for a human being incapable of writing passable verse,

he simply does not exist It is done, as everyone knows, by

children and sometimes so well that their poems are

printed in books and quite solemnly reviewed. But good

music is never written by children and I am not forgetting

Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Music belongs to the


very latest stage of culture; to compose it in the grand

manner requires painful training, and the highest sort of

natural skill. It is complex, delicate, difficult. A miracu-

lous youth may show talent for it, but he never reaches any-

thing properly describable as mastery of it until he is

mature. The music that all of us think of when we think of

the best was written by men a bit bent by experience. And

so with prose. Prose has no stage scenery to hide behind. It

is spontaneous, but must be fabricated by thought and pains-

taking. Prose is the ultimate flower of the art of words.

Next to music, it is the finest of all the fine arts. (Smart Set,

January, 1921, pp. 39-40; Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924,

pp. 240-8; A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. 553-4: Hand-

Painted Oil Paintings)

MUSICAL

ALLUSIONS TO

AUTHORS

Is DREISER actually deaf to their dreadful cacophony?

(American Mercury, March, 1926, pp. 379-81 review of

An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser; A Mencken

Chrestomathy, p. 504)

I try to give you, ineptly and grotesquely, some notion of

the talk of the man, but I must fail inevitably. It was, in

brief, chaos, and chaos cannot be described, but it was chaos

drenched in all the colors imaginable, chaos scored for an

orchestra which made the great band of Berlioz seem like a

fife and dram corps. (Century, June, 1921, pp. 191-7;

Prejudices, Third Series, 1922, pp. 65-83; A Mencken

Chrestomathy, p. 512: Huneker: A Memory)

There is in "Heart of Darkness'' a perfection of design

which one encounters only rarely and miraculously in prose

fiction: it belongs rather to music. I can't imagine taking


a single sentence out of that stupendous tale without leaving

a visible gap; it is as thoroughly durch componiert as a

fugue. And I can't imagine adding anything to it, even so

little as a word, without doing it damage. As it stands it is

austerely and beautifully perfect, just as the slow movement

of the Unfinished Symphony is perfect (Smart Set, Decem-

ber, 1922, pp. 141-4; Prejudices, Fifth Series, 1926, pp. 34-

41;A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 520: Joseph Conrad)

What the enigmatical Pole has to offer is something quite

different If its parallel is to be found in music, it is not in

Schubert, but in Beethoven perhaps even more accurately

in Johann Sebastian Bach. (Smart Set, December, 1922,

pp. 141-4; Prejudices, Fifth Series, 1926, pp. 34-41; AMencken Chrestomathy, p. 518: Joseph Conrad)

FROM A LETTER

TO ISAAC GOLDBERG

(May 6, 1925)

OFMY TASTES in music: in the main they are very orthodox.

I put Beethoven first, even ahead of Bach mainly, I sup-

pose, because I have heard more of him than Bach. It

seems to me that the first movement of the Eroica, Beetho-

ven's first formal defiance of the old symphonic music, re-

mains unparalleled today. Even Beethoven never wrote

anything more colossal. The funeral march following seems

tome to be, by contrast, almost banal. But of all the Beetho-

ven symphonies I like No. 8 best. It is light but anyone who

regards it as trivial is simply a damned fool. Two things

attract me to Beethoven: first, his immense dignity; second,

his superb workmanship. He is never hollow and senti-

mental and he makes more of a few bald notes than most

composers make of first-rate melodic ideas. Consider the

first movement of the Fifth and the slow movement of the

Seventh. He is the musical scientist par excellence. He never

trusts to mere inspiration. All his effects are achieved by

sheerbrain power.


Next to Beethoven, as a master of the larger forms, I put

Brahms. His first symphony is almost incomparable. In-

comparable? Then what of his second and fourth? Two

masterpieces! I like his third rather less. His "Deutches

Requiem" belongs in the front rank of choral works. I put

it beside Bach's B minor Mass. Compared to it, all the fa-

miliar oratorios are shabby stuff, fit only for Methodists.

Early in life Brahms wrote a trio, opus 8. 1 believe that its

first subject is one of the most beautiful melodies ever writ-

ten. Only Schubert everwent beyond it.

Of Schubert I hesitate to speak. The fellow was scarcely

human. His merest belch was as lovely as the song of the

sirens. He sweated beauty as naturally as a Christian sweats

hate. What I marvel at is the neglect of some of his best

music, for example, the Tragische Symphonic. Its slow

movement is certainly almost as good as the slow movementof the Unfinished. Yet it is seldom played. So with his trios

and his other piano music. I once traveled 80 miles to hear

his octette. The horn player failed to show up, and I had to

play his part on a piano. His quintette, opus 163, is another

masterpiece. His two piano trios, op. 99 and 100, are both

too long but what fine stuff is in them! Take a look at their

slow movements. Schubert's songs I have heard, of course,

but I greatly dislike singing, and so I enjoy them less than I

ought to. There is more music in his "Deutsche Tanze"than in the whole of Debussy. The fact that these little

waltzes and Landler are very simple deceives many. But so

is the Parthenon simple.

Of Mozart I say little. Lake Schubert, he is beyond ciiti-

Letter to Isaac Goldberg 199

cal analysis: he simply happened. Why are his smaller

symphonies so little played? At least six of them are perfect.

The big orchestras apparently play only the Jupiter and the

G minor. In the same way most of the Haydn symphonies

are forgotten. Everything that Haydn wrote, including espe-

cially his string quartettes, should be played publicly at least

once a year in every civilized city of the world. It would

make people ashamed of listening to the maudlin obsceni-

ties of Stravinsky and company.

Of Schumann I like best his first and fourth symphonies.

The second seems dull to me. The third lacks coherence,

though it is very lovely in spots. Mendelssohn I like in

spots, for example, the scherzo of the Scotch symphony.I greatly admire a number of second-raters: among them

Goldmark and Dvofdk. Goldmark knew how to be senti-

mental without shedding crocodile tears. Dvorak wrote a

great deal of fine stuff in the smaller forms for example,

his Slavonic Dances. I think they are much better than the

Hungarian Dances of Brahms more ingenious and far

more beautiful.

Of the men still alive, I believe that Richard Strauss is

easily the first. He is the only man who has offered a serious

challenge to Wagner as a dramatic composer I don't mean

a theater composer. He builds up a climax with intense

skill, and handles the orchestra better even than Wagner.

His music is not often loyely, but it is always moving. But

he knows how to write a tune when he wants to. The first

act of "Der Rosenkavalier" is worth all the Italian operas

ever written. Of all his work, I prefer "Electra" and "Tod

2oo H. L. Mencken ON Music

und Verklarung." I also like such parts of "Feuersnot" as I

have heard; unfortunately, I don'tknow the whole opera,

Wagner was probably the best musician who ever lived,

as Schubert was the greatest genius who ever wrote music.

His command of his materials was unmatched in his time,

and has never been surpassed, save by Richard Strauss. His

ideas, of course, were infinitely better than Strauss'. In

"Tristan und Isolde/' for example, he displays so many, and

they are so good, that the effect is almost stupefying. I be-

lieve that "Die Meistersinger" is the greatest single work of

art ever produced by man. It took more skill to plan and

write it than it took to plan and write the whole canon of

Shakespeare. Wagner's defect is that he is often theatrical,

and hence a mountebank. Think of the Char-Feitag music

in "Parsifal." It actually describes a romantic but plainly

illegal act of love.

Puccini, I believe, has been underestimated. He was the

best of the wops. His aim was to entertain well-fed folk after

dinner and he did it very competently. "La Boh&me" is

surely not a great work, but anyone who fails to get pleas-

ure out of it must be tone-deaf. Verdi, I believe, is not to be

heard sober, but with a few whiskies under my belt I enjoythe last act of "II Trovatore." Chopin is another composerwho is best heard after seeing a bootlegger. His music is ex-

cellent on rainy afternoons in Winter, with the fire burning,the shaker full, and the girl somewhat silly.

The so-called moderns interest me very much, for I amfond of experiments in the arts. But I'd rather read their


music than hear it. It always fails to come off: it is Augen-

musife.1

So far as I can make out, Stravinsky never had a musical

idea in his life that is, in the sense that Schubert and

Mozart had them. He makes up for his lack of them by

tuning his fiddle strings to G flat, D sharp, B and B sharp,

and playing above the bridge. That such preposterous rub-

bish is solemnly heard and applauded is sufficient proof that

a sucker is born every minute. I believe that not more than

10% of the people who go to concerts are actually interested

in music, or get any genuine pleasure out of it They are

simply interested in mountebanks, i.e., fiddlers, cater-

waulers, conductors, etc. When the composer happens to be

a mountebank also they are doubly pleased.

I never go to hear virtuosi if I can help it. Even Kreisler

tires me after an hour. It offends me greatly to see a per-

former getting applause that belongs to the composer. I take

little interest in conductors, though I know a number of

them and like them as men. Their importance is im-

mensely overestimated. A flute player with a severe Katzen-

jammer can do more to spoil a concert than even a Dam-

rosch. Of all the conductors I am familiar with I like Muck

the best. He is a good musician and respects composers. His

conducting is intelligent, painstaking and in good taste. He

1 One wonders what he would say today of the current trend to

"dehumanize" music: of Anton von Webern's scientific and super-

contrived compositions, Stockhausen's music of chance and Davi-

dovsk/s electronic etudes.

2O2 H. L. Mencken ON Music

does not give a show; he plays the music. His competence

naturally made him unpopular with frauds who constitute

a majority of Boston Orchestra audiences, and at the first

chance, during the late war, they fell on him. Some time

ago I heard the Boston Orchestra in New York, under

Koussevitsky. It was like meeting a beautiful woman of the

year 1900 now middle-aged, simpering, and hideously

frescoed.

I seldom go to the opera; it is to music what a bawdyhouse is to a cathedral. The spectacle of fat women sweat-

ing, with their mouths wide open, is very offensive. I

believe that most of the best music written is in the form of

symphonies for grand orchestra; I'd rather hear it than anyother kind. I greatly enjoy chamber music, especially when

I am helping to play it. I believe, with Franz Kneisel, that

most string quartettes would be improved if they had parts

for bull fiddles, and were quintettes. Some of the loveliest

music in the world is written for string quartettes but it

inevitably begins to sound thin after half an hour or so. Toomuch of the music is above middle C.

I know very little about piano music, and seldom play the

piano alone. Piano music, in the main, seems to me to lack

dignity. Even the Beethoven Sonatas fall below old Lud-

wig's usual level. But maybe I underestimate them because

most of them are beyond my technique. That may also ex-

plain my feeling that Chopin is a sugar-teat. As a boy I

used to like Moskowski. I got over itwhen I began to smoke.

French music, in the main, does not stir me; it is pretty,

but trashy. I believe that Vincent D'Indy is one of the worst


composers ever heard of, with Massenet close upon his

heels. Bizet I like very much better; he at least did not

simper. I like some of the New Russian music I mean,

of course, the pre-Stravinskian music. Tschaikovsky, when

he tried to be solemn, became merely bombastic, but he

could write lovely tunes, and he put many of them into his

smaller stuff, for example, the Casse-Noisette suite. He

should have written fewer symphonies* and more waltzes.

Which brings me to Johann Strauss. I believe that he was a

musician of the first caliber a man vastly more talented

than, say Mendelssohn. "Geschichten aus dem Wiener

Wald" is not merely good; it is a masterpiece. Beethoven

would have admired it, as Wagner, Schumann and Brahms

admired it.

Why German music should be so much better than any

other kind I don't know. I have often wondered. The Eng-

lish, theoretically, should be good musicians. They have

good ears, as their poetry shows, and they excel at team-

work. But most of their music, at least in our time, is

palpably fourth-rate. They never get beyond a pretty

amateurishness. All their genuinely good composers are

non-English for example, Sullivan (a man of very great

talent) and Delius. There are, indeed, only two kinds of

music: German music and bad music.

1 have spoken evilly of French music. I except, of course,

2 H. L. Mencken has flatly caHed The Sixth Symphony (Tschai-

kovsky's) the "Homosexual Tragedy." (See Men of Music by

Brodnvay and Weinstock. New York: Simon and Schuster; 1939,

P- 491-)


that of Cesar Frank. He was a man of immense talent. But

I deny that he was a Frenchman, or that he wrote anything

properly describable as French music. He was, in fact,

scarcely more a Frenchman than Handel was an English-

man. But Berlioz? Well, 111 give you Berlioz. But did he

write any music?

Jazz? It may be defined briefly as the sort of music that the

persons who go to the opera really like. A few amusing in-

genuities are in it; it is clever in the same sense that a carica-

ture may be clever. Some day a composer of genuine talent

will put a jazz scherzo into a symphony. A hundred years

hence that is all that will be remembered of jazz.

POSTLUDE AND VALE

POSTLUDE

LOUIS CHESLOCK

(The Saturday Night Club)

FROM THE earliest days of his association with the Herdd,

Mencken sought out his colleagues on the staff who were in

any way music-minded. If they could play or sing they met

for musical evenings. Through Joseph Callahan, one of his

associates, he met a number of better amateurs. Two of

them joined forces with him and Callahan around 1902,

and by 1904 the four were meeting regularly on Saturday

nights. Mencken was the pianist, Callahan the feeble sec-

ond fiddle, and Samuel Hamburger then a pants salesman

and later an electrician the zealous first. The fourth mem-

ber was Albert Hildebrandt, maker of and dealer in violins,

and an ardent amateur 'cellist These men formed the nu-

cleus of the Saturday Night Club.

During the next several years more men were admitted to

the group. Some of the performers were downright poor and

some were highly skilled professionals. To be a member one

had to be, first of all, a genuine lover of music. If he could

play fine! If not, he had to listen. His conversation had to

208 Postlude

be worth while, and he had to be able to hold his own at

the beer table. Acceptance into the group had to be unani-

mous.

Perhaps brief biographies of some of them the combi-

nation of whom seasoned and flavored the group will help

make better known the club's unusual character. Heinrich

Ewald Buchholz was the financial editor of the Herdd. His

knowledge of music was limited, but he was excellent com-

pany. Later, when the club held its sessions in Hilde-

brandt's violin shop on Saratoga Street, instead of in the

homes of members, and went afterward to the old Rennert

Hotel, only a few steps away, Buchholz arranged the supper.

But more important, he served as the club's librarian.

The first professional musician to join was Theodore

Hemberger. Born in Bruchsal, Germany, in 1871, he came

to Baltimore in 1903 after a ten-year stay in Pennsylvania,

where he was the conductor of the Scranton SymphonyOrchestra and of a large chorus, besides playing first violin

in a string quartet He was invited to Baltimore to acceptthe leadership of its well-known Germania Maennerchor.

Shortly after his arrival he became director also of a numberof other German singing societies and of Zion Lutheran

Church. Later he became violin instructor at the Peabody

Conservatory of Music. Mencken heard him play and hewas elected to membership. His influence was immediatelyfelt. He made arrangements of compositions to suit the

limited number of players. It was "Theo H." who suppliedMencken with a piano version of the Brahms Second Sym-phony, played it over with him a number of times, and won

The Saturday Night Club 209

him away from the biased view of Brahms he got from

Wilberfoss G. Owst, the Herald's music critic.

Dr. John Wade had been a professional flute player when

a young man. He played in the Monumental theatre, where

some of Baltimore's most peppery burlesque shows were

given. The salary helped pay his way through medical col-

lege. He was the first woodwind player to join the club. An-

other performing member who joined about 1910 was the

famous anatomical artist, Max Brodel. Born in Leipzig in

1870, he was forced to begin the study of piano at the age of

six by his music-loving father, Louis. His endless enthusiasm

for playing the piano was no less than Mencken's, who

played secundo to his primo.

A picture of the club taken in November, 1913, shows the

following seated around the beer table in a private room

reserved for them at the Rennert Hotel: Henry L.

Mencken,* Samuel Hamburger,* Max Cathcart* (he

played the piano, after a fashion, and was a good bass singer

who knew every note of the Gflbert and Sullivan operettas) ,

Paul Patterson (business manager of the Sunpapers),

Frederick Colston,* Theodore Hemberger,* Harry Bush,

Willard Huntington Wright (author of the famous Philo

Vance mystery stories, published over the pseudonymn

"S. S. Van Dyne"), Frederick A. Rummer, (author and

playwright), Adelin Fermin (teacher of voice at the Pea-

body Conservatory, occasionally guest pianist with the

club), Dr. John Wade,* Col. Joseph Wickes (employed at

the Baltimore City Hall he sometimes played the 'cello),

Albert Hildebrandt,* John Phdps, Max Brodel,* Philip

21O Postlude

Green (president of a local millwork plant), Matthew

Tinker* (in charge of a local railroad terminal), Folger

McKinsey*

(the "Benztown Bard/ poet for the Balti-

more Morning Sun), David Bacharach *(eminent pho-

tographer) , and Alexander H. McDannald.

Those with asterisks after their names were members.

Absent at the time the picture was taken were Buchholz,

Callahan and Prof. Blanckennagel (the latter a member of

Goucher College faculty, who played flute and piccolo).

Frequent guests at that time were: Carl Schon (maker of

fine jewelry), Philip Goodman (publisher and theatrical

producer), Ernest Boyd (British consul in Baltimore), Dr.

Henry Flood, and Dr. John Ruhrah.

One of Mencken's oldest friends was native Baltimorean

W. Edwin Moffett, who in his youth was a cornet player in

a Sunday School group. Later he transferred from cornet to

trombone, and played with the Peabody Symphony Orches-

tra. He gave up the trombone, too, to apply himself seri-

ously to the study of the double bass. He became extremely

proficient on the instrument and was made principal bass in

the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when it was founded in

1916.

Another distinguished professional musician was Dr,

Gustav Strube. Born in Balenstedt, Germany, in 1867, he

came to America in 1889 to be a violinist in the Boston

Symphony Orchestra under Arthur Nikisch. Later he was

made assistant conductor, and for ten years prior to leaving

the orchestra he was also director of its "Pop" concerts. In

1913 he came to Baltimore to teach at the Peabody, and a


few years later was the organizer and conductor of the Balti-

more Symphony Orchestra. He became a member of the

club in 1914. Some of his most charming, lighter works

were composed for the club.

Joining at this time also was the affable Adolph Torovsky.

A Bohemian by birth, he came to America while yet a

young man. He was not here long before he became the

bandmaster at the Naval Academy, where he remained un-

til he retired in 1922. He then took charge of the music at

St. John's College in Annapolis. Torovsky was a musical

"natural," for he was able to perform well on nearly any

musical instrument. He preferred the strings, and these he

played most often. He was one of the club's best-loved

composers, writing for it the kind of music he remembered

from his youth the lovely, nostalgic melodies of Bohemia

and Vienna.

William W. Woollcott, brother of the famous Alexan-

der, became a non-performing member around 1917. His

home in Catonsvflle, a suburb of Baltimore, was the site, in

1922, of a brave attempt by the club to play, then and there

and one after another, the first eight of Beethoven's sym-

phonies. The idea was Woollcott's. The attempt, of course,

came to grief, but a lot of fun was had. Willie wrote the

words and music of the club's own anthem, "I am a 100%

American." Mencken picked out the notes for him on the

piano and Hemberger harmonized it. The piece found its

way into printand is now widely known.

Dr. Franklin Hazlehurst was one of Mencken's boyhood

friends. The family lived on Hollins Street near the Menck-

212 Postlude

ens. Upon his graduation from Hopkins, Frank went to

Germany for further study. He became an eye-ear-nose-

and-throat specialist. He played the violin and 'cello.

Raymond Pearl, Professor of Biology at Johns Hopkins,

played the French horn.

Old Dr. Christian Deetjen, of German stock but born in

Brazil, became a member in the early 1920*5. When a youngman he had been sent to Germany for his medical edu-

cation. He was among the pioneers in radiology, and be-

cause the risks in this work were not sufficiently known at

the time, his hands became badly burned and disfigured.

His hobbies were folk medicine, witchcraft and the distil-

lation of fine liqueurs. He was a non-playing member. Dr.

Max Kahn, another radiologist, was one too.

Israel Donnan's talent for violin was recognized when he

was a student at the Peabody, and on graduation he was

appointed a teacher in its Preparatory Department For a

long time, also, he played first violin in the Baltimore Sym-

phony. He joined the dub sometime in the mid-i92o's.

For many years these were the chief members of the dub,and they remained members to the end of their days, or un-

til the club disbanded. I first heard Henry Mencken play the

piano more than thirty years ago at the home of Gustav

Strube. The program opened with the Cesar Franck sym-

phony. From the first notes it was obvious that Menckenknew his music. With each new shift in tempo and tonalityhe was the soul of the ensemble. Sudden pianissimo andhe hushed the bass and horn. He signaled each entry. Andso it went through exposition, development, recapitulation


and into the coda. And at the end he let out an enormous

whoop.

When Dr. Wade died, around 1931, the club had great

difficulty in finding another agreeable flutist. But a couple of

years later Buchholz introduced Frank Purdum, a prosper-

ous druggist, who played the flute with us several times as a

guest before he was made a member. Shortly after, Menck-

en's brother, August (engineer and author), became a non-

performing member.

With the passing of Albert Hildebrandt, in 1932, the dub

found itself even harder pressed for another 'cellist. Wehad a number of good guest players, but it was not until

five years later that the dub found in Samuel Donnan,

Israel's younger brother, the man they wanted. But, un-

happily, he, too, died shortly afterward, and the 'cello parts

for a long time thereafter were played by Torovsky or Haz-

lehurst. During the next several years (1939-46) the club

suffered a series of appalling losses: Pearl, Brodel, Deet-

jen, Torovsky, Hadehurst, and Purdum.

Around 1942, Dr. Arnold R. Rich, Professor of Pathology

at Johns Hopkins, joined us with his viola. (He and I have

facetiously engaged in a running dud since we fest met on

the question of what does or does not constitute a folk-

song.)*

About two years later, George Newcomer, a lawyer,

joined topky second violin. Then followed Robert Waite, a

'cellist He came from Indiana, was in government employ,

1 See Mencken's article^ 'The Music of tie American Negro,"

(p. 153) which is the view, I too, have always held.

214 Postlude

and introduced by Newcomer. In 1945, James M. Cain, who

had been a frequent guest, became the only non-resident

member, and thus allowed to pay his own check at supper.

(It was a rule of the club that a guest could not pay for his

food or treat the club or any of its members. Nor could any

member treat the club except on his birthday, when he paid

for a round of beers. Incidentally, the club never accepted

invitations to meet away from home.) For a short time in

1948-9, Dr. Joseph Blum played the violin and viola.

After the death of Max Brodel, in 1941, Mencken asked

me to take over primo piano, where I remained until the

break-up of the club nine years later. Playing beside

Mencken was an exhilarating experience.

The club's library contained approximately 500 works,

including nearly all the standard symphonies, as well as

many well-known overtures, tone-poems and suites. Most of

the classical chamber music repertoire was there, too, and

an amazing number of waltzes, marches, and selections

from operas and operettas, as well as popular pieces like

"Old Man River," and "The Beer Barrel Polka." Included

were a number of rare works, some out of print. And, of

course, the many original pieces written by members.

While everyone chipped in from time to time to meet the

cost of some music, most of the library was contributed

by Mencken.

During Prohibition days the club met at the homes of

members, but with Repeal we went back to Hildebrandt's

shop (now located on St. Paul Street) and to the Rennert

for supper. But the old hotel was no longer the charming


place it had been, and after some trial meetings at other

restaurants we found what we wanted in a private room at

Schellhase's.

Throughout the near half-century of its existence the club

met every Saturday night. Only if Christmas night might

fall on a Saturday, and once, to attend the premiere of a

ballet by one of its composer members, did the group omit

its meeting.

Henry Mencken's outlet for music-making was almost

exclusively in the Saturday Night Club. He rarely missed a

meeting. When he suffered a stroke in 1948, and could no

longer play, his interest in music did not wane. He sent

word from the hospital that he hoped the club would con-

tinue and that he could return to it soon himself. During his

long illness he listened nightly to radio broadcasts of good

music. Throughout the winter months he tuned in on Satur-

days to the Metropolitan broadcasts when they did Mozart,

Strauss, or Wagner. Alfred Knopf sent him a good phono-

graph on his return home and he enjoyed listening to re-

cordings of his favorite composers.

Toward the close of 1950 it became apparent that the

club had seen its best days. On December 2, 1950, a meeting

was held in which it was resolved that the weekly musical

sessions be permanently discontinued, and the library be

presented to the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The action was

immediately carried out and this marked the end of the

Saturday Night Club. A few of the members continued

for a short time to meet sporadically on Saturday nights for

beer and talk, but soon these meetings, too, came to an end.

VALE

LOUIS CHESLOCK

UNTIL the time of his final illness it had been cus-

tomary for Mencken, while still associated with the

Sunpapers, to write an obituary on the passing away of

a dub member. The one given here, on Albert Hilde-

brandt, reveals a warm tenderness and deep feeling for

his lifelong friend, who was, with him, one of the

original members of the Saturday Night Club. I be-

lieve that its writing must have come to him in the

form of music.1If it were translated into tone it might

very wellbecome a Canto Elegjui, con amore.

The End of a Happy Life


THE LATE Albert Hfldebrandt, who died last Thursday, had

barely turned sixty, but he really belonged to an older Balti-

1 "When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful

idea, it is always in the form of music/' (Happy Days. New York:Alfred A. Knopf; 1940, p. 196.)

The End of a Happy Life 217

more, and it was far more charming than the Rotarian

Gehenna we endure today. He was one of its genuine no-

tables, though he got into the newspapers very seldom.

What kept him out was mainly his own surpassing ami-

ability: he was completely innocent of that yearning to

harass the neighbors which commonly passes among us as

public spirit.If he ever made a speech it must have been be-

fore I met him, which was more than thirty years ago. Whenthe Babbitts of the town held a banquet and afflicted one

another sadly he stayed at home, playing the violoncello,

orwent to a beerhouse for a decent evening with his friends.

When a public committee was appointed to improve man-

kind and solve the insoluble he was not on it.

Nevertheless, there were few Baltimoreans of his time

who were better worth knowing, for he stood in the first rank

of a very difficult profession. He practiced it all his life with

unfailing devotion and complete honesty, and that practice

not only engrossed him but also pleasantly entertained

him, and made him content. He enjoyed violins as other

men enjoyed pictures or books. When he encountered a

good one he would strip off his coat and have at it with the

enthusiasm of a Schliemann unearthing a new Troy, and

when a bad one came into his hands he would demolish its

pretensions with a gusto but little less. If his judgement

was ever questioned, it was not by sensible men. He was so

obviously the master of his subject that, once he had ex-

pressed his views and offered his reasons, there was no an-

swer short of complaining to the police.

There were chances in his business for considerable kill-

218 Vde

ings, but he seldom took advantage of them. His attitude

toward the violins that passed through his hands was com-

monly more sentimental than commercial, and he spent a

lot of time and energy upon labors that brought him little

profit, and sometimes not even thanks. It always seemed to

me that a sort of professional delicacy stayed him that he

was too sensitive about the honor of his distinguished

house, and had too much respect for violins themselves, to

traffic in them too brutally. When the impulse to pile up

money came upon him he always turned to some other en-

terprise, usually highly speculative. That other enterprise

was never a shining success, but while it lasted it at least

gave him the feeling that, within the bounds of his vo-

cation, he could remain the free artist, and suffer no com-

pulsion to approach the unseemly, which was to him the

impossible.

His instrument, as I have said, was the 'cello, which he

mastered in early youth, and stuck to faithfully all his life.

Violins were always in his hands, but he never ventured to

play them, and in fact had no talent for the business. But as

a 'cellist he had great skill, and in the Baltimore of his day

there was no amateur to match him. He was a big fellow,

tall, muscular, handsome and imposing, and he had a tone

to go with his size. When he would get a good grip upon his

bow and fall upon a passage to his taste the sounds that

came out of his 'cello were like an army with banners.

Moreover, they were the precise sounds that stood in the

score, for he had a fine ear and he played in tune all the way

up the scale, even to the treacherous peaks of the A string.


He remained strictly an amateur to the end. He was often

besought to play professionally, but he always refused. Years

ago he was a member of the Haydn and Garland Orches-

tras and other such amateur organizations, and often ap-

peared in public, sometimes as a soloist, but as he grew

older he withdrew from this activity, and confined himself

to playing with his family and his friends. So long as St.

Mary's Seminary was in operation in Paca Street, he played

there at the midnight mass every Christmas Eve. He was

completely empty of piety, but he got on very well with

the clergy, and one of his close friends was the late Dr.

Theodore C. Foote, of St. David's, Roland Park, another

amateur 'cellist. More than once I have done accompani-

ments to their duets, with each exhorting the other to lay

on, and the evening ending with the whole band exhausted.

On the secular side he got through almost everything

written for the 'cello. For twenty-five years he went to the

late Frederick H. Gottlieb's house every Sunday night to

engage in chamber music, and even longer he played every

Saturday night with another club. Nor was this all, for he

put in many evenings playing with his wife, his daughter

and his sister-in-law, and in the earlier days there were weeks

when he made music every night He was always ready to

drop everything for a session with his 'cello. Once, years

ago, I happened into his place one afternoon when a Ger-

man exchange student was calling on him. The German al-

lowed that he was a fiddler, and Al suggested a couple of

trios. We played from 4 to 6:30, went out to dinner, re-

turned at 7:30, and kept on until n. Another time he was a

22O Vale

party to a desperate scheme to play the first eight Beetho-

ven symphonies seriatim. We began late one afternoon, and

figured that, allowing for three suppers, one breakfast, one

lunch, and five pauses for wind and beer, the job would take

24 hours. But we blew up before we got to the end of the

Eroica.

The headline that I have put on these lines indicates that

this was a happy man. I believe that, in all my days, I have

never known a happier. There were some people he disliked,

and in discussing them he was capable of a blistering in-

vective, but on the whole he was too good-humored to have

enemies, and he got on well even with musicians, who

are sometimes very difficult. He was a bachelor for many

years, but he was always quartered with friends, and so had

a comfortable home. He made a good living, spent his

money freely, had a civilized taste for sound eating and

drinking, and never tired of music for an instant. When he

married, relatively late in life, his luck remained with him,

and he was presently the center of a charming family circle,

with a little daughter whose precocious talent gave him

great delight. He had a long and trying illness, but he was

nursed with singular devotion and his doctor was an old and

valued friend and, I hope I need not add a fiddler too. Hefaced death calmly, and slipped into oblivion at last with

simple courage and no foolish regrets.

Such a man, it seems to me, comes very close to the

Aristotelian ideal of the good citizen and the high-mindedman. There was no pretension in him, but his merits

were solid and enduring. He possessed a kind of knowledge


that was not common, and it was very useful. He treated his

clients with great scrupulosity, and his professional repu-

tation, unchallenged for many years, went far beyond the

bounds of Baltimore. He was so unfailingly kindly, so thor-

oughly square and decent, so completely lovable that the

whole world that he knew was filled with his friends. Most

of his leisure, in his later days, was spent with men he

played with, musically and otherwise, for twenty, thirty and

even forty years. The old-timers all stuck to him, and there

were always youngsters coming in, to learn him and love

him. Save when illness made a prisoner of him he saw them

constantly, and even as he lay dying he knew that he was in

their daily thoughts, and would never pass out of their mem-

ories.

They drop off one by one Sam Hamburger, Phil Green,

John Wade, Carl Schon, Henry Flood, Fred Colston,

Charlie Bochau, and now Al Hildebrandt. These were

pleasant fellows, one and all. The common bond between

them was their love of music, and I suppose that there is no

better to be found. Certainly there can be none that makes

life more genuinely cheerful and contented. Most of the

men I have named were amateurs, and some were only

listeners, but they had in common that amiable weakness

for the squeaks of the fiddle and the burble of the flute, and

it kept them together for long years. They clustered around

Al Hildebrandt He was, in his way, the best friend of every

one of them, and he remains the best friend of many who

still live.

Mourning him would be rather silly. He died too soon,

222 Vde

but so do we all. The universe is run idiotically, and its only

certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, bytheir generally pleasant spirits, by their intense and en-

lightened interest in what they have to do, by their simple

dignity and decency, by their extraordinary capacity for

making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some

measure, the common destiny of mankind, doomed like

the beasts to perish. Such a man was Albert Hildebrandt.

It was a great privilege to be among his intimates; he radi-

ated a sound and stimulating philosophy, and it was con-

tagious. In all my days I have known no other who mighthave taken to himself with more reason the words of the

ancient poet: 'The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant

places; yea, I have a goodly heritage/'

INDEX OF COMPOSERS

AND PERFORMERS

Index

ANTHEIL, GEORGE, 167-8

BACH, JOHANN SEBASTIAN, 6,

19-26, 48, 60, 62, 88, 91,

102, 104, 122, 125, 130,

133. 140, 155, 165* 168,

185, 192, 196-8

BACH, KARL PHILIPP EMAN-

UEL, 6

BALAKIREFF, MDLY ALEXEIVICH,

137-9

BEETHOVEN, LUDWIG VAN, vii,

10, 27-43, 47, 49, 50-2,

55-6, 58, 60-2, 68-9, 77,

80, 82, 88, 90-2, 104,

130, 138, 145, 15*, 155,

158-9, 162, 165, 167-8,

185, 187-8, 191-3, 196-

7, 202-3, 211, 220

BERLIOZ, HECTOR, 82, 139, 162,

204

BEYER, FERDINAND, 8

BIZET, GEORGES, 105, 203

BOCHAU, CHARLES, 221

BORNSCHEIN, FRANZ, 3

BORODIN, ALEXANDER, 138-40

BOYLE, GEORGE, 156

BRAHMS, JOHANNES, vii, 12,

33, 35, 43"50, 55, 61, 68,

77, 79, 82, 86, 96, 98,

104, 152, 165, 178-9,

198-9, 203, 208-9

, HANS VON, 98

CALLAHAN, JOSEPH H., 3, 207

CARUSO, ENRICO, 183

CHAPMAN, BLANCHE, 115

CHOPIN, FRDRIC, 33, 36, 131

144, 168, 185, 187, 191,

200, 202

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR, SAMUEL,

94

GUI, GfcsAR, 137, 139

CZERNY, KARL, 8

DAMROSCH, WALTER, 201

DAVTOOVSXY, MARIO, 20in

11 Index

DEBUSSY, CLAUDE, 33, 140,

159, 168, 185, 198

DELIUS, FREDERICK, 203

DENHAM, GEORGE W., 108

DETTERER, PAULINE, 25

DONIZETTI, GAETANO, 120

DORMAN, ISRAEL, 212

DVO&K, ANTONIN, 33, 49, 84,

91-100, 131, 146, 152,

179, 199

HARVEY, PAULINE, 108

HAYDN, FRANZ JOSEPH, 27, 34,

38, 40, 55, 60-2, 67-77,

104, 162, 178, 185, 191

193, 199, 219

HEMBERGER, THEODORE, 208-9

HERBERT, VICTOR, 129

INDY, VINCENT D', 202

EBERHARD, ERNESTINE HOHL,

26

ELGAR, SIR EDWARD, 131

FIEDLER, ARTHUR, 70

FRANCE, G&SAR, 204, 212

GARCIA, MANUEL, 145

GERMAN, EDWARD, 112

GILMORE, PATRICK, 119

GOLDMARK, KARL, 199

GONCOURT, 113

GOUNOD, CHARLES, 133

GRIEG, EDVARD, 129

GUNG'L, JOSEPH, 78, 103

HALVY, JACQUES, 113

HANDEL, GEORGE FRIEDRICH,

74,204

JADASSOHN, SALOMON, 174

KERN, JEROME, 30

KNEISEL, FRANZ, 202

KOMCHAK, KARL, 79

KOUSSEVITSKY, SERGEI, 2O2

KREISLER, FRITZ, 201

LANDOWSKA, WANDA, 165

LANNER, JOSEPH, 78

LECOCQ, CHARLES, 114

LENO&MAND, REN, 161

LESCHETIZKY, THEODOR, 9

LINCKE, PAUL, 79

LISZT, FRANZ, 65, 80, 103

MAHLER, GUSTAV, 68, 82

MANSFIELD, RICHARD, 115

Index in

MARTINOT, SAIDE, 114

MASCAGNI, PEETRO, 105

MASSENET, JULES, 202

MENCKEN, HENRY Louis, 10,

14

MENDELSSOHN, FELIX, 36, 49,

57, 68, 82, 88-91, 128-9,

131, 178, 193, 199, 203

MILLS, KERRY, 93, 120

MOFFETT, W. EDWIN, 210

MOSCHELES, IGNAZ, 80

MOSZKOWSKI, MORITZ, 131, 2O2

MOZART, WOLFGANG AMA-

DEUS, 10, 27, 34-5, 40,

55, 60-2, 68, 88, 145,

155, 162, 165, 168, 178-

9, 193, 198, 201, 215

MUCK, KARL, 201

MUSORGSKI, MODESTE, 138-9

NEVIN, ETHELBERT, 131

NIKISCH, ARTHUR, 210

OFFENBACH, JACQUES, 104, 114,

129

ORNSTEIN, LEO, 164

PADEREWSKI, IGNAZ JAN, 92

PALESTRINA, GIOVANNI PIER-

LUIGI DA, 133

PETER, W. C., 8

PLANER, MINNA, 63-4

Puccmi, GIACOMO, 33, 105,

185, 187, 200

RAFF, JOSEPH JOACHIM, 179

REICHARDT, JOHANN FRIEDRICH,

57

REUTTER, GEORGE, 71

RIES, FERDINAND, 29

RlMSKY-KORSAKOFF, NlKOLAY

ANDREYEVICH, 138-41

ROSSINI, GIOACCHINO ANTO-

NIO, 30, 64

RUBENSTEIN, ANTON, 129, 131

SATIE, ERIC, 163-4

SCHAEFER, JULIAN K., 3, 11

SCHINDLER, ANTON, 30

SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD, 140,

l6o, 164

SCHUBERT, FERDINAND, 54

SCHUBERT, FRANZ PETER, 12,

3, 33, 35, 46-7, 51-63,

68, 77, 84, 95, 98, 104,

122-3, 145, 158, 174,

178-9, 193, 196, 198,

2OO-1

SCHUMANN, ROBERT ALEXAN-

DER, 12, 33, 68, 80-9, 98,

104, 145, 155-7, 192-3,

199, 203

IV Index

SCRIABIN, ALEXANDER 169

SECHTER, SIMON, 59

SHEEHAN, 107

SIBELIUS, JAN, 122

SILCHER, FRIEDRICH, 58

SOUSA, JOHN PHILIP,, 76, 118-

20, 122-3, 178

STOCKHAUSEN, KARLHEINZ,

2oin

STOKOWSKE, LEOPOLD, 121-5

STRAUSS, EDUARD, 77

STRAUSS, JOHANN, THE ELDER, 77

STRAUSS, JOHANN, THE YOUNGER,

30, 76-80, 114, 123, 126,

129, 167, 185, 191, 193,

203

STRAUSS, JOSEPH, 77

STRAUSS, RICHARD, 82, 103-4,

140, 156-8, 160-1, 185,

188, 199* 200, 215

STRAVINSKY, IGOR, 33, 160, 164,

167, 199, 201, 203

STRUBE, GUSTAV, 67, 80, 91-2,

210

SULLIVAN, SIR ARTHUR, 79,

107, 109-14, 203, 209

SUPPE, FRANZ VON, 104

TOROVSKY, ADOLPH, 211

TSCHAIKOWSKY, PETER ILICH,

33, 36, 68, 82, 119, 131,

192, 203

VERDI, GIUSEPPE, 33, 105, 120,

200

WAGNER, RICHARD, 33, 41, 55,

57> 63-7. 79> 82, 91, 103,

105, 122, 124, 129, 145,

1577 159, 162, 165, 185,

188, 199, 200, 203, 215

WAINWRIGHT, MARIE, 114

WALDTEUFEL, EMIL, 77-8

WEBER, CARL MARIA VON, 145

WEBER, DIONYS, 30

WEBERN, ANTON VON, 20171

WERNER, HEINRICH, 58

WIDOR, CHARLES-MARIE, 130

WIECK, CLARA, 80, 85-6

WIECK, FRIEDRICH, 85-6

WOLF, HUGO, 192

WOLLE, JOHN FREDERICK, 1911,

22, 26

TAUBERT, KARL, 81

TIT% ANTON EMIL, 157

TITTMAN, CHARLES T., 25-6

YSAYE, EUGENE, 178

ZIEHRER, KARL MICHAEL, 79

H. L. MENCKENwas born in Baltimore in 1880 and died there in

1956. Educated privately and at Baltimore Poly-

technic, he began his long career as journalist,

critic, and philologist on the Baltimore MorningHerald in 1899. *n 1906 he joined the staff of the

Baltimore Sun, thus initiating an association withthe Sun papers which lasted until a few years be-

fore his death. He was co-editor of the SmartSet with George Jean Nathan from 1908 to 1923,and with Nathan he founded in 1924 the Ameri-can Mercury, of which he was editor until 1933.His numerous books include A Book of Burlesques

(1916); A Booh of Prefaces (1917); In Defenseof Women (1917); The American Language(1918 4th revision, 1936); Supplement One(1945); Supplement Two (1948); six volumes of

Prejudices (1919, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1927);Notes on Democracy (1926); Treatise an theGods (1930); Treatise on Right and Wrong(i934); Happy Days (1940); Newspaper Days(1941); Heathen Days (1943); A MenckenGhrestomathy (1949); and Minority Report(1956). Mencken also edited several books; heselected and edited A New Dictionary of Quota^tions (1942). He was co-author of a number of

books, including Europe after 8:15 (1914); TheAmerican Credo (1920); Heliogabalus (a play,1920); and The Sunpapers of Baltimore (1937).

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

THIS BOOK is set in Electra, a Linotype face designed

by the late W. A. Dwiggins (18801956). This face

cannot be classified as either modern or old style. It is

not based on any historical model, nor does it echo

any particular period or style. It avoids the extreme

contrasts between thick and thin elements that mark

most modern faces, and attempts to give a feeling of

fluidity, power, and speed.

Composed, printed,, and bound by

Kingsport Press, Inc., Kingsportf Tenn.

Paper manufactured by

S. IX Warren Co., Boston.

Typography and binding design

based on originals by

W. A. DWICGINS

109985

h.l. mencken on music

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